Quests for Certainty Across History: The Concept of Truth in Doctor Faustus Anonymous College

What is truth but the best of us in all of us. Great truths are portions of the soul of man. There are no facts, only interpretations. There is no one truth, or ‘the truth’, but there are as many truths as there are perspectives, and there are as many perspectives as there are disciplines that inform varying senses of the world from diverse points of knowledge. There are opposing claims as to what institutes as truth, what things are deemed as being factual or untrue, how to define and recognise truth, the roles that discovered and acquired knowledge play, and whether truth is subjective or objective, comparative or total.

Dooyeweerd's modal aspects of reality as we experience or sense it spans across quantitative, spatial, kinematic, physical, biotic/organic, sensitive/psychic, analytical, formative, lingual, social, economic, aesthetic, juridical, ethical/ attitudinal and pistic/faith disciplines and studies. In Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1590), our protagonist Dr Fautus has a keen yearning for “the truth” in the book of magic spells Mephastophilis has provided him. Thus, this essay will discuss the implications of Dr Faustus’s relentless quest for certainty in knowledge, with the temporal...