Neo-Existentialism - by Markus Gabriel (Paperback)

About the Book

"In this highly original book, Markus Gabriel presents 'Neo-Existentialism', an anti-naturalist view that holds that human mindedness consists in an open-ended proliferation of mentalistic vocabularies. Challenged by Charles Taylor, Andrea Kern and Jocelyn Benoist, Gabriel deftly refutes naturalism's metaphysical claim to epistemic exclusiveness"--

Book Synopsis

In this highly original book, Markus Gabriel offers an account of the human self that overcomes the deadlocks inherent in the standard positions of contemporary philosophy of mind. His view, Neo-Existentialism, is thoroughly anti-naturalist in that it repudiates any theory according to which the ensemble of our best natural-scientific knowledge is able to account fully for human mindedness. Instead, he shows that human mindedness consists in an open-ended proliferation of mentalistic vocabularies. Their role in the human life form consists in making sense of the fact that the human being does not merely blend in with inanimate nature and the rest of the animal kingdom. Humans rely on a self-portrait that locates them in the broadest conceivable context of the universe. What distinguishes this self-portrait from our knowledge of natural reality is that we change in light of our true and false beliefs about the human being.

Gabriel's argument is challenged in this volume by Charles Taylor, Andrea Kern and Jocelyn Benoist. In defending his argument against these and other objections and in spelling out his theory of self-constitution, Gabriel refutes naturalism's metaphysical claim to epistemic exclusiveness and opens up new paths for future self-knowledge beyond the contemporary ideology of the scientific worldview.

Review Quotes

"Markus Gabriel has a radical and deeply interesting conception of what philosophical picture we should form of our situation, a conception which has roots in classical German philosophy and retrieves a powerful but neglected portion of the existentialist legacy. This book weighs the familiar claims of naturalism and anti-naturalism in new terms and puts forward an original proposal for exiting from the deadlock to which they all too often lead."
--Sebastian Gardner, University College, London

About the Author

Markus Gabriel was born in 1980 and studied in Heidelberg, Lisbon and New York. Since 2009 he has held the Chair for Epistemology at the University of Bonn and with this appointment he became Germany's youngest philosophy professor. He is also the director of the International Center for Philosophy in Bonn.