Sense and Nonsense in California: A Conversation with Markus Gabriel

Los Angeles Review of Books - Markus Gabriel speaks to Andrea Capra about his philosophy of a New Enlightenment. By Andrea Capra

MARKUS GABRIEL, born in 1980, is a philosophical overachiever. Multilingual and widely published, he became full professor of philosophy at the age of 29 and since then has been chair in epistemology and modern/contemporary philosophy at the University of Bonn. Markus has also held a number of visiting positions all over the world, including at UC Berkeley and the New School.

When I first met him, I thought he was erudite yet refreshing and quick-witted, amusing yet somewhat arrogant and irritating. That’s why I wanted to get to know him better. Our acquaintance developed over his monthlong stay at Stanford’s Humanities Center in March 2022, mostly over drinking and dining sessions, which allowed us to skirmish about topics such as geopolitics, artificial intelligence, and the New Realism, of which Markus is a prominent representative.

The following conversation spans a number of Markus’s philosophical ideas. He in Germany and I in New Jersey, we chatted over Zoom about why he believes, among other things, that the world needs to become more enlightened. And while the correlation may strike as a bit overdone, it is perhaps no coincidence that we took California and its luminosity as this exchange’s background.