A very enjoyable book that presents classic arguments from philosophy by discussing examples of superhero comics. If you are interested in comics, then this book will give you a good, solid introduction to many interesting problems in philosophy, while also teaching you to see superhero comics from a more sophisticated point of view.

What if an evil genius is tricking you into believing that the world around you is real when it really isn’t? What if on an alternate Earth everything is identical but for one almost undetectable detail? What if trying to travel to the past transported you to a different universe instead? What if a mad scientist removed your brain and is keeping it alive in a vat of nutrients? What if lightning struck a dead tree in a swamp and transformed it into The Swampman?

Any of these fantastical plots could be the premise of a superhero comic book. … Except none of those scenarios comes from comics. They’re all thought experiments written by highly regarded philosophers.

So begins the fascinating journey on which Chris Gavaler and Nathaniel Goldberg take us in their marvellous 2019 book Superhero Thought Experiments.

What if an evil genius is tricking you into believing that the world around you is real when it really isn’t? 

This book is part of a wider trend to bring the philosophy treatment to popular culture. As far as I know, the most prominent and long-living example of this is the “… and Philosophy” series from Open Court Publishing. From The Simpsons and Philosophy to Lord of the Rings and Philosophy this long-running series (some of the titles were published in the early 2000s), covers all the usual suspects: Dungeons and Dragons, The Matrix, Buffy, Harry Potter, all the way to Stephen Colbert and Philosophy. I was therefore surprised to see that the Superhero book was not in that series but published by University of Iowa Press. This might be one of the reasons why the book has fewer than 10 reviews on Goodreads, when, for example, The Simpsons and Philosophy have over 3,000. The unusual venue may have made it harder for the right audience to find the book.

The book’s audience

But the relative obscurity of the work is certainly not deserved – quite the opposite. I am myself not a superhero audience; my knowledge of the matter is limited to what I’d heard of Superman, Batman and Spiderman as a child, and then, at a later age, reading Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Still, I found Superhero Thought Experiments fascinating and easy to read, even without the background in superhero lore.

One reason is that the authors seem to be very well aware that there are two distinct audiences for their book: philosophy …

Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)