Allegorical Philosophy: An Experimental Approach

//This is one of my earliest papers in philosophy, written before I received any formal training on the topic.// This paper is concerned with one of the most significant and timeless (and unanswered) problems of philosophy: existence; and specifically, the existence of the world itself. My research is chiefly concerned with exploring the question of existence in terms of object-identity, which requires that things (res) be individually countable and defines countable items in terms of philosophical physicalism (materialism). In addition to a brief review of the most current philosophical inquiries into this die Gretchenfrage, an independent inquiry into the question is rendered in the form of a short piece of creative writing, which should be viewed as a meager attempt at modernizing Wittgenstein’s “Riverbed and Time” or Plato’s “Cave of Shadows.” The primary concern is not the creative narrative itself, or the construction of that narrative, but rather the development of the philosophical inquiry utilizing the narrative to objectively answer the question of terminal world (die Welt) existence without regard to individual desire.