Preface

This book owes its existence, as well as its present form, to numerous institutions and individuals. First of all, I would name the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which supported my project about fictional objects as part of the Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship for experienced academics. This was carried out in several research residencies from 2017 to 2019 at the Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne University at the invitation of my host, Jocelyn Benoist. In this context, Jocelyn is the first person I should thank warmly for his philosophical and personal hospitality. Many of the ideas that have entered this book were first presented in Jocelyn’s research seminars on intentional objects and social ontology, and also in lectures at various Parisian universities.1 This is not the place to list all the conceptual details that arose from the wonderful dialogical situation in Paris; some of them are documented in the notes. To do justice to the fact that the traces of our dialogue form a crucial layer of the deep conceptual dimension of the reflections published here, I have dedicated this book to him in friendship.

As well as the Humboldt Foundation, I owe thanks to the CNRS, the Maison Suger and the Collège d’études mondiales (and thus the FMSH too). Since 2017 the CNRS has supported the Bonn–Paris research centre Centre de recherches sur les nouveaux réalismes (CRNR) as part of the excellence initiative LIA (Laboratoire international associé). This research centre is supported both by the University of Bonn and Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne, represented by the respective managements. The ceremonial opening took place on 25 September 2017 at the Sorbonne. I am grateful to Prof. Dr Dr h.c. Michael Hoch, head of the University of Bonn, and Prof. George Haddad, president of Paris 1, for their generous support.

The joint meetings of the CRNR in recent years focused on, among other things, the ontology of unicorns, the reality of norms (both promoted with notable posters …) and the relation between perception and reality – which covered the three pillars of the present study. In this context, I extend my warm thanks to those colleagues in Bonn and Paris who are members of the research centre, especially Sandra Laugier, who is advancing the expansion of the LIA in a philosophically, institutionally and personally proactive fashion.

I am grateful to the University of Bonn for generously allowing free research time during my stays in Paris and for the extremely favourable conditions at the International Centre for Philosophy NRW and the Centre for Science and Thought. I would also like to thank the University of Bonn for granting me research semesters, including the one I am currently fortunate to be spending in New York City as the Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair at New York University. For this, I am especially grateful to my colleagues at the German department for their hospitality, as well as the honour of being nominated for this visiting professorship. I am equally grateful to the participants in my graduate course in ‘Fiction and Reality’, which served as the final test run for the now published study, as well as the many conversational partners in New York who provided me with critical queries and pointers.

In addition to the lectures on topics dealt with in this book given on speaking trips to the USA, Japan, China, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Portugal, Spain and Chile, I received especially profound suggestions from the philosophers, literary scholars, ethnologists and historians who kindly invited me, as the Walker Ames Lecturer, to seminars and lectures and the University of Washington in Seattle and Tacoma. I should give a special mention to Monika Knaup, with whom I had the chance to have intense discussions about the New Realism in philosophy and literary studies.

The person to whom I am most indebted for the reflections culminating in an outline for an objective phenomenology in the second part is Thomas Nagel, with whom, since my postdoctoral studies at NYU (2005–6), I have frequently debated the central question of what form a philosophy of nature would require in order to grasp the spirit as an irreducible manifestation of the universe. His monistic stance will presumably prevent him from agreeing to the present suggestion, but I do offer a diagnosis in the main text to continue the dialogue. Because of this encounter, which was especially important for my philosophical development, I was particularly happy to finish this book at NYU.

I received a veritably eye-opening shock from my encounters with Giulio Tononi, which took place as I was writing the second part. I would therefore like to thank the Chilean government of that time, especially the Senate (represented by Senator Guido Girardi), for the honour of being invited in 2018 to the Congreso Futuro, where I met Giulio for the first time (in the Antarctic, no less), and then, on a remarkable journey from Santiago de Chile to Valparaíso, had the opportunity to explore Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and its relation to New Realism in hours of conversations. This was followed by reciprocal visits to Wisconsin and Bonn. Naturally, this process was also influenced by Christof Koch, with whom I discussed various topics of the book in Wisconsin and Seattle.

In May 2019 in Bonn, Giulio asked after countless rounds of asparagus what current philosophical project posed the greatest challenge for New Realism. The answer: IIT. I was unable to undertake a detailed examination of the empirically informed ontology of consciousness, from which he derives a philosophy of nature that is currently unrivalled, so this will have to wait until a later opportunity.2

Three other people contributed substantially to the orientation of Fictions as the continuation of Sense and Existence through their objections to specific aspects of ontology of fields of sense: Anton Friedrich Koch, Julia Mehlich and Graham Priest. All three presented astute variants, each with their own approach, of an objection that, if true, demonstrated that ontology of fields of sense is reconcilable with a metaphysical fictionalism according to which the world exists in the field of sense of the imagination. In addition, Priest proposed a mereological model that, with a logical sacrifice of well-foundedness, causes the world to appear as an object in the world; he too based this in part on fictions – Borges’s Fictions, to be precise.

As I was concluding work on the manuscript, Jens Rometsch made me realize that, for much of the book, I had had Anton Friedrich Koch in mind as my model reader, which I immediately conceded, even if I had not been consistently aware of it. In fact, my methodological sensibility – combining motifs from German Idealism more analytico with a sufficiently robust (albeit non-metaphysical) realism – was decisively influenced by the very long conversation that took place during the World Cup semi-final between Germany and Italy on 4 July 2006, which was almost impossible not to hear, at the Burse3 in Tübingen, when he took me to task at his research colloquium for my formulation of a generalizable sceptical paradox. Since then, the conversation has steadily continued. I am grateful to Toni for his untiring and perceptive objections, which have led at least to reformulations, if not (yet) to a reformation, of my pluralism.

As always, this book would never have been completed without my outstanding university team, all of whom read every single line of text, commented on it and improved it, as well as doing the diligent work of completing the notes. For this, my thanks go to Philipp Bohlen, Alex Englander, Marin Geier, Mariya Halvadzhieva, Dina Khamis, Georg Oswald, Jens Rometsch, Guofeng Su and Jan Voosholz.

Jens Rometsch has (comme d’habitude for almost twenty years) tirelessly, and sometimes on a daily basis, made suggestions for adjustments in direction and, through his excellent habilitation thesis ‘Freiheit zur Wahrheit’ [Freedom for Truth], not only corrected my image of Descartes but also provided me with the concept of an ‘overall mental state’ (which he himself does not accept), by which I mean the de facto agent of the plurimodal cogito, as elaborated in the text.

Wolfram Hogrebe and Tobias Keiling read the complete manuscript and added critical comments that have hopefully saved me from making overly grave mistakes.

Certainly, it is impossible to retrace with absolute certainty all the textual and oral influences on the development of my thinking as reflected in this sequel to Sense and Existence. Nonetheless, I wish at least to provide an incomplete alphabetical list of important interlocutors not mentioned thus far in order to document which conversations in recent years have had an effect on my argumentation: Clemens Albrecht, Ned Block, Paul Boghossian, Thomas Buchheim, Otávio Bueno, Tyler Burge, Massimo Cacciari, Taylor Carman, Stephen Cave, David Chalmers, James Ferguson Conant, Paulo Cesar Duque Estrada, George Ellis, David Espinet, Armin Falk, Maurizio Ferraris, Günter Figal, Dominik Finkelde, Michael Forster, Manfred Frank, Marcela García, Tristan Garcia, Werner Gephart, Sacha Golob, Wouter Goris, Iain Hamilton Grant, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Jens Halfwassen, Marta Halina, Graham Harman, David Held, Christoph Horn, Axel Hutter, Adrian Johnston, Alexander Kanev, Daniel Kehlmann, Tobias Keiling, Andrea Kern, Paul Kottman, Johannes F. Lehmann, Andrea Le Moli, Jocelyn Maclure, Quentin Meillassoux, Ulf-G. Meissner, Raoul Moati, Hans-Peter...