Thanks for the update, Ed.
I expressed some of my misgivings about Gabriel’s project in our last (unrecorded, unfortunately) talk. I had said (something to the effect of) that his kind of philosophizing makes people dislike (ok, maybe I said “hate”) philosophers.
Granted, he is obviously a competent and deservedly well-respected philosopher—but just at face value, his claim that “the world does not exist” struck me as too cutesy, or disingenuous, to take seriously—in other words, as just the kind of counter-intuitive claim that a philosopher would stereotypically make to get us to supposedly “think.”
Of course the world doesn’t “exist” in the same way that things in the world exist—including things in our “inner worlds.” But then, neither does “consciousness” or the “mind” or any ground-reality exist in any way we can simply locate.
My question for Gabriel: If the world does not exist, then how is it that we can be approaching the brink of another “world war”? The world may not ex-ist, but it nonetheless IS, and we have to deal with it…
From what I can tell, in his attempt to chart a course beyond postmodern constructivism, he does not give enough weight to the role that language plays in framing the realities we experience. (Otherwise, he could not simply presuppose that there is a reality called “Vesuvius,” even granted multiple perspectives on Vesuvius.)
Sure, he’s been through the “linguistic turn” (referencing Heidegger multiple times, for example—though only summarily to dismiss him), but I wonder how deeply he’s absorbed the implications of Heidegger’s thinking on the relationship between “language” and “world.”
Of course, we’d have to read through his whole book to sort through these issues. I may give the rest of his book a more careful read myself, if the time opens up. But in sum, I just didn’t find his opening claims—that we need a “new realism,” that “the world does not exist”—to be sufficiently compelling to follow his arguments through.
Thanks, though, for rattling the cage and getting another conversation started!