“Through an Orb Darkly”: Doctor Strange and the Journey to Knowledge

One turns to epistemology, the area of philosophy that explores what they can know, why they think they know it, and how they know it. The answers will help them to make sense of the strange world of Doctor Stephen Strange. Epistemology determines the most reliable source of knowledge of the world so they can trust that what they believe is actually true. Rene Descartes was dissatisfied with the epistemology of the classical and medieval philosophers who had come before him, which relied heavily on divine revelation in addition to reason and sense experience. One consequence of Descartes' exercise in skepticism is mind-body dualism, the belief that humans are made up of two distinct but intimately related substances: mind and body. While most philosophers are skeptical of dualism, wondering how a purely non-physical substance like the mind could interact with a purely physical substance like the body, Doctor Strange himself has to be a dualist.