The Real of Reality: Markus Gabriel

Markus Gabriel born 1980 studied philosophy, ancient philology, German literature and philology in Hagen, Bonn and Heidelberg. In Heidelberg he finished his Ph.D. under the supervision of Jens Halfwassen and wrote a thesis on Schelling’s later philosophy. In 2005 he was a visiting scholar at the university of Lisbon. From 2006-2008 he worked as lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. In 2008 he finished his habilitation with a work on scepticism and idealism in ancient philosophy. From 2008-2009 he was assistant professor at the department of philosophy of the New School for Social Research, New York. Since 2009 Gabriel is a full professor in epistemology, modern and contemporary philosophy at the University of Bonn.
 
Gabriel is considered to be part of the contemporary philosophical movement called “New Realism” or “speculative Realism.” In his own approach Gabriel argues that there is no all-encompassing totality: that the world, in the traditional sense of a domain of all domains, cannot exist. Yet, he convincingly shows that this does not entail ontological nihilism. Rather, he argues that the non-existence of the world entails an infinity of domains and shows that this motivates a general realism. This ontology hinges on Gabriel's concept of fields of sense, which shows that, fundamentally, he opposes the idea that mathematics or the natural sciences could ever replace a richer philosophical understanding of what there is and how we know about it.

Video Documentary:

ZKM | Institute for Visual Media

Camera: Sarah Binder
Editing: Frenz Jordt
Live Editing: Christina Zartmann