A White Horse Is Not a Horse: Markus Gabriel’s “New Realism”

Philosophical reasoning in ordinary language is subject to inference traps. There are several philosophical responses to such traps: mysticism (language and our senses, etc., are metaphysically misleading. We need mystical insight); the modern approach of deserting natural languages for artificial ones; that of cleaning up natural-language reasoning on an ad hoc basis; and the “it’s all good” approach—run with the reasoning as our ways of speaking seem to allow. An extended analysis of Markus Gabriel’s Why the world does not exist shows how he consistently engages in the “it’s all good” approach to motivate both his claim that the world does not exist as well as the claim that, nevertheless, everything in the world does exist. It is shown how he uses various fallacies involved in natural language—notably ones about the word “in” to facilitate his metaphysical arguments.