‘No World’ Is Not Enough: Markus Gabriel and the Possibility of Metaphysics

In a series of books and articles Markus Gabriel has argued that the world (the totality of everything that exists) does not itself exist (his famous ‘No World’ thesis), and because metaphysics studies the world (the totality of everything that exists), metaphysics is impossible (after all, its object does not even exist). In this essay, I grant Gabriel the No-World thesis and focus instead on the claim that metaphysics studies the world (understood as the totality of everything that exists). Why should we think that metaphysics is about the world in this sense (a totality-object, e.g., a universal set)? One way Gabriel motivates this claim is by quoting contemporary metaphysicians who use ‘the world’ to define their topic. I argue, however, that this is merely the result of terminological sloppiness on their part, rather than a sign of a deep theoretical commitment. I then consider Gabriel’s other main argument for this claim: metaphysics is about absolutely everything, and quantifying over absolutely everything requires a set (the domain of quantification, e.g. a set) that contains absolutely everything. I argue, on the contrary, that absolutely unrestricted quantification does not incur commitment to an absolutely unrestricted set, and that, therefore, it is consistent for metaphysics to be about absolutely everything, but not about ‘the world’ (absolutely everything as a totality-object).