Objects and Fields of Sense: Reflections on Markus Gabriel’s Ontology

This article develops the contrasts between Markus Gabriel’s Fields of Sense and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). The major differences are that OOO accepts the Kantian thing-in-itself, and is also more sympathetic to modes of access to reality other than knowledge: which Gabriel (following Frank Ramsey) dismisses as “whistling.” Nonetheless, OOO and Gabriel are united in accepting relatively flat ontologies, and in rejecting the view that either mathematics or natural science are privileged viewpoints when compared with aesthetics and other domains.