Why the world does not exist

Markus Gabriel’s world is bigger than the universe, and includes not just humans but elves, fairies, Prime Minister Ed Miliband and unicorns on the far side of the moon – everything that exists, even if only in the imagination.

How can the universe be smaller than the world? Because the universe, as Gabriel defines it, is only one ontological province among others; a field of sense in which one can speak of distant nebulae and subatomic particles, but not unicorns. But there are other fields of sense too, in which we can speak of unicorns – imaginary objects have their own object domains.

The universe as understood by Gabriel, then, is not only a thing out there but also a kind of perspective, the perspective of science. By contrast, the world contains all ontological perspectives and, given that there are in principle an infinite number of such perspectives, that means it is pretty big. And the world is nonexistent because we can never have a perspective on it from the outside. As the great philosopher and Gabriel’s former teacher Thomas Nagel put it, there is no view from nowhere. [Guardian]