The problems with Markus Gabriel’s criticism of naturalism and fisicalism

Abstract

This papper critically examines Markus Gabriel’s arguments against naturalism and physicalism, arguing that his critique rests on a mistaken and reductive characterization of the target positions. First, it analyzes Gabriel’s central argument for the nonexistence of the world, which claims that the concept of an all-encompassing totality leads to paradoxes of self-reference. Next, the article demonstrates that Gabriel’s attack on physicalism focuses almost exclusively on a version of type-identity physicalism, neglecting more robust and currently dominant formulations such as supervenience physicalism, realization physicalism, or grounding physicalism, which are more resistant to many of his objections. It is argued that Gabriel illegitimately infers the impossibility of ontological hierarchies from the Kantian-Fregean logical-semantic thesis that existence is not a first-order predicate. While defending Gabriel against criticisms that portray him as an obscurantist or scientific denier, the article contends, in turn, that a non-reductionist naturalism is not only defensible but necessary as a metaphysical presupposition of scientific practice, thus avoiding both Gabriel’s critiques and the pitfalls of a naïve scientism.