Fictions

"Markus Gabriel’s incisive and illuminating Fictions poses foundational questions both for the public sphere and for academic institutions. His astute argument revolves around three aspects essential to the task of world-making as a progressive practice: fact-finding, fiction-shaping and truth-telling. As acute about narrative as he is astute about its ontological sources, this book is a treat to read as it accomplishes its urgent tasks. The exigencies of the philosophy of mind are brought to bear on the facts and fictions of everyday life."
Homi Bhabha, Harvard University

"The polemical edge of Markus Gabriel’s Fictions in the current Anglo-American debates marks a return to philosophy’s original promise of describing the human mind as a core condition for existing reality – without paying the price, conceded by contemporary analytical approaches, of disappearing in the offside of academic specialization. Based on a reshaped concept of ‘fiction’ as permeating everyday perception, Gabriel brings philosophy back to the claim and function of serving as a matrix for productive intellectual exchanges between different sectors of praxis and culture."
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem

"Fictions interfuses philosophy with problems of great interest to literary scholars. Unfolding in three movements, from fictional realism through mental realism to social realism, the book lands in the contemporary moment, when what is real seems to have become a contested matter. Readers from a wide range of fields will find entry points into this discussion on every page."
Christy Wampole, Princeton University

"The traditional opposition between fiction and reality has prevented us from understanding how much fiction is part of being and contributes to making it ours. By making sense of the many ways in which fictions exist, Markus Gabriel restores its humanity to being and its being to humanity."
M. Jocelyn Benoist, University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne