Markus Gabriel > Quotes

“Philosophers view the world to a certain extent in the same way as do alien beings or children. Everything is always completely new. They mistrust strongly ingrained judgments, and, yes, they even mistrust the scientific claims of experts.”
― Markus Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist

“the task of philosophy is to start over from the beginning time and time again.”
― Markus Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist

“When, at a closer glance, so many objects are questionable, when all knowledge seems to be clothed in a kind of deep unknowing, why do we still place any trust at all in reality as it appears to us, in the world in which we seem to live?”
― Markus Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist

“If I had the talent, say, to draw the visual field that is right infront of me, I would be able to see a picture of my visual field. But obviously this picture would not be my visual field but only another thing in my visual field. The same applies to the world: whenever we consider ourselves to have understood the world, we have only a copy or a picture of the world before us. We cannot grasp the world conceptually because there is no field of sense to which it belongs. The world does not appear on the stage of the world; it does not step up and introduce itself to us.”
― Markus Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist

“In other words, Kant’s defence of revisionary ontological monism entails at the very least the possibility of revisionary ontological pluralism. I take him to be committed to revisionary ontological monism because he thinks that the domain of appearances contains within it everything that exists, and anything that is outside the domain cannot exist, but might perhaps schmexist. However, Kant’s monism cannot make sense of this option, in particular, because it limits the concept of real possibility to the domain of existence. Thus, the other domains – schmexistence, krexistence, X-istence, and so on – are not really possible, but are maybe schmpossible, krpossible, or X-possible.”
― Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology

“This aim has been undermined through an infiltration by postmodern arbitrariness, which still expects us to believe that there is ultimately no objective truth, no such thing as facts that can be brought to light using suitable research methods – only politically coloured opinions.”
― Markus Gabriel, Moral Progress in Dark Times: Universal Values for the 21st Century