On Seinfelde
October 17, 2015
timothywstanley@me.com
Still, the notion of reality or existence that the new realism proposes remains tepid. For Gabriel, to exist means to appear in what he, in reference to Wittgenstein’s later notion of language games, calls a 'field of sense': a finite domain of meaningful connections. Fields of sense — in German, Seinfelde, a play on words that affords Gabriel, a connoisseur of American popular culture, an opportunity to allude to his favorite sitcom — stand in contrast to metaphysical attempts to understand the world as a finite, graspable totality.
Richard Wolin, "Alternate Realities," The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://bit.ly/1Lt7S2l . Interesting review of new realism in Markus Gabriel's Why the World Does not Exist.