Still, the empirical universe presents an ontological difficulty for Śaṅkara because he is an epistemic realist. He accepts that external objects are not individual subjective illusions because we perceive these effects with intersubjective agreement. The world is thus independent of mind and not wholly unreal. One may therefore argue that he contradicts himself or falls into an excluded middle (see Fost 1998). The universe either exists or does not exist, is real or unreal, and cannot be both s