Markus Gabriel b. 1980

Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher, professor at the University of Bonn, and the youngest holder of a German philosophy chair when he was appointed in 2009. Why the World Does Not Exist and Fields of Sense developed his New Realism, in which there is no all-encompassing world but an irreducible plurality of fields of sense, each with its own conditions of existence. His more recent work has applied the program to mind, neuroscience, and ethics, arguing in I Am Not a Brain and Moral Progress in Dark Times that the human person is irreducible to its cerebral substrate.

Markus Gabriel was born in Remagen on the Rhine in April 1980. He took his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 2005 with a study of ancient scepticism and habilitated there in 2008 with a thesis on Schelling. Appointed professor of epistemology, modern, and contemporary philosophy at the University of Bonn in 2009 at the age of twenty-eight — at the time the youngest holder of a philosophy chair in Germany — he directs the International Centre for Philosophy and the Center for Science and Thought at Bonn.

His books include Why the World Does Not Exist (Warum es die Welt nicht gibt, 2013), the systematic Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (2015), I Am Not a Brain (Ich ist nicht Gehirn, 2015), Neo-Existentialism (2018), The Meaning of Thought (2019), Moral Progress in Dark Times (2020), The Power of Art (2020), and Fiktionen (2020).

Gabriel, with Maurizio Ferraris, has been the principal advocate of the New Realism that emerged in the 2010s as a programme against postmodern correlationism: there are indefinitely many 'fields of sense', existence consists in appearing in some such field, and there is no all-encompassing field — hence 'the world does not exist'. He combines this ontology with a non-naturalist philosophy of mind, a moral realism, and a public-intellectual practice that reaches a wide German readership.