Markus Gabriel

What role can the humanities play in shaping our common future? What are the values that guide us in the 21st century? How can we unleash the potential the humanities offer in a time of multiple crises? This volume tackles some of these fundamental questions, acknowledging and developing the changing role of academic discourse in a turbulent world. This timely...

Is it possible for reality as a whole to be part of itself? Can the world appear within itself without thereby undermining the consistency of our thought and knowledge-claims concerning more local matters of fact? This is a question on which Markus Gabriel and Graham Priest disagree. Gabriel argues that the world cannot exist precisely because it is understood to...

From ancient philosophy to contemporary theories of fiction, it is a common practice to relegate illusory appearances to the realm of the non-existent, like shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Contrary to this traditional mode of drawing a metaphysical distinction between reality and fiction, Markus Gabriel argues that the realm of the illusory, fictional, imaginary, and conceptually indeterminate is...

Many consider the nature of human consciousness to be one of the last great unsolved mysteries. Why should the light turn on, so to speak, in human beings at all? And how is the electrical storm of neurons under our skull connected with our consciousness? Is the self only our brain’s user interface, a kind of stage on which a...

The challenges we face today are unprecedented, from the existential crisis of climate change to the global security threats posed by aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere. Add to this the crisis of liberal democracy, and we seem to be swirling in a state of moral disarray, unsure whether there are any principles to which we can appeal today that would...

In this highly original book, Markus Gabriel offers an account of the human self that overcomes the deadlocks inherent in the standard positions of contemporary philosophy of mind. His view, Neo-Existentialism, is thoroughly anti-naturalist in that it repudiates any theory according to which the ensemble of our best natural-scientific knowledge is able to account fully for human mindedness. Instead, he...

A leading German philosopher offers his most ambitious work yet on the nature of knowledge, arguing that being wrong about things defines the human condition. For millennia, philosophers have dedicated themselves to advancing understanding of the nature of truth and reality. In the process, they have amassed a great deal of epistemological theory—knowledge about knowledge. However, negative epistemological phenomena, such...

The climate crisis has forced us to recognize that we are not separate from nature but are part of the natural world on which we depend: human beings are animals and we must understand much better our place in nature and our impact on our environment if we are to avoid our own annihilation as a species. And yet we...

From populist propaganda attacking knowledge as ‘fake news’ to the latest advances in artificial intelligence, human thought is under unprecedented attack today. If computers can do what humans can do and they can do it much faster, what’s so special about human thought? In this new book, bestselling philosopher Markus Gabriel steps back from the polemics to re-examine the very...

We live in an era of aesthetics. Art has become both pervasive and powerful – it is displayed not only in museums and galleries but also on the walls of corporations and it is increasingly fused with design. But what makes art so powerful, and in what does its power consist? According to a widespread view, the power of art...

Doing Good is a bold call for a new social contract in a world buckling under the weight of multiple crises – geopolitical tension, ecological collapse, technological disruption, growing inequality, and the slow erosion of liberal democracy. The promises of modernity, once rooted in the convergence of technoscientific progress and liberal capitalism, have failed to deliver widespread peace and prosperity....