The book 'Why the World does not Exist'

I haven't read the book, or watched the video. I am engaging you in an effort to discern if rpenner's attack on you in another thread - to which I took him to task - might have in any way been justified. If I decide it wasn't I shall renew my demand that he apologise to you. If I decide it was I shall apologise to him.

 

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Do you think he denies the existence of the world in a particular sense?

 

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<sigh> "World" is just a label for a concept. Whether one agrees or not, he very plainly explains in the printed interview below why he chooses to drop that general idea for the multiple domain situation which his particular take on new realism fancies. You've surely heard the cliche from Romeo and Juliet: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet". It doesn't matter if we call it French "monde" or drop a name-tag for it completely as Gabriel apparently does. The significance of and the regularities of our outer perceptual experiences from which the concept of "world" was originally abstracted are not going to suddenly be altered or diminished.

Treating a word or the cognitive content it represents as if it's "out there" in the extra-mental sense of "external environment" is the partial insanity which commonsense realism flirts with. The manifested outer reality is asserted to still be just like it appears even when no observing brain / body is around to have that relation to it, and is accordingly mind-independent or mind-less. And yet we then inconsistently proceed to project our very interpreting thought and linguistic constructs "out there" upon it with the qualitative appearances we beforehand reified.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/113/Markus_Gabriel

New Realism’ was used as a label before, a hundred years ago, but this is not the same thing, right? This is a new movement, which you have co-defined with Maurizio Ferraris, is that right? So what’s that all about?

What’s new is that I define New Realism as a combination of two tenets. Tenet one: we can grasp things in themselves. That’s the sense that philosophers have attached to the word ‘realism’ – as a theory of our access to how things really are, so I hold on to that. My more radical approach is shown in tenet two:, things in themselves do not belong to a single domain, ‘the world’. So what I mean by New Realism is realism without the world. Many philosophers would say that realism means we have immediate access to the world [as it really is]; but I deny the existence of ‘the world’ in this particular sense. So it’s realism without a single reality. That’s what I think is new about this particular approach. In a certain sense I’ve learnt a lot from the anti-realist philosophers who popped up all over the place after the earlier New Realism movement, in which people like Roy Wood Sellars, the father of Wilfrid Sellars, were involved. I think the earlier movement was not yet able to fully formulate the theories needed because anti-realism had not yet been developed in the relevant ways by Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam.

 

Gabriel's arguing against a particular concept of existence that he attributes to Kant. Here's how he explains it:

"I agree with certain versions of the famous Kantian line of thought according to which existence is not what I call a proper property... by a 'proper property' I mean a property ... which puts one in a position to distinguish an object in the world from another object in the world. Existence certainly is not a property that divides the world up into two realms, that of the existing things and that of the non-existing things... That would be a weird world picture.

Against this background, Kant has argued that existence is world-containment, that is, the world's property to contain spatio-temporal individuals... However that immediately raises the question whether the world itself can exist on this model. Is the world contained by the world?... Is the world some kind of set or mereological whole? Would it even make sense to say that the world is a spatio-temporal individual located within the world?"

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/why-the-world-does-not-exist-but-unicorns-do/

 

So we can say that he doesn't deny the existence of the world in real sense but as a concept?

 

Yah, you betcha. If he denied the empirical / manifested "given" or whatever the inspiration is for the "world" concept for the average person, that would disqualify his philosophical stance from being classified as new realism (i.e., the latter is not generic anti-realism). He's merely an eccentric member of that genre in that he avoids a supposedly uncritically examined idea ("world") that might be a hand-me-down of traditional custom or grunt thinking. The concept doesn't fit the needs of his specific new realism scheme or is not applicable to it for _X_ reasons he gives.

"For new realism, the assumption that science is not systematically the ultimate measure of truth and reality does not mean that we should abandon the notions of reality, truth or objectivity, as was posited by much twentieth century philosophy. Rather, it means that philosophy, as well as jurisprudence, linguistics or history, has something important and true to say about the world. In this context, new realism presents itself primarily as a negative realism: the resistance that the outside world opposes to our conceptual schemes should not be seen as a failure, but as a resource – a proof of the existence of an independent world. If this is the case, however, this negative realism turns into a positive realism: in resisting us reality does not merely set a limit we cannot trespass, but it also offers opportunities and resources. This explains how, in the natural world, different life-forms can interact in the same environment without sharing any conceptual scheme and how, in the social world, human intentions and behaviors are made possible by a reality that is first given, and that only at a later time may be interpreted and, if necessary, transformed."

 

And humans are merely evolutionary kanonenfutter and should, by all means, satisfy themselves with that and not look for more. Yes.

 

well, whatever you want to call this thing I'm stuck in it with no solid answers.