Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics

Description

What is 'truth'? The question that Pilate put to Jesus was laced with dramatic irony. But at a time when what is true and what is untrue have acquired a new currency, the question remains of crucial significance. Is truth a matter of the representation of things which lack truth in themselves? Or of mere coherence? Or is truth a convenient if redundant way of indicating how one's language refers to things outside oneself? In her ambitious new book, Catherine Pickstock addresses these profound questions, arguing that epistemological approaches to truth either fail argumentatively or else offer only vacuity. She advances instead a bold metaphysical and realist appraisal which overcomes the Kantian impasse of 'subjective knowing' and ban on reaching beyond supposedly finite limits. Her book contends that in the end truth cannot be separated from the transcendent reality of the thinking soul.

Catherine Pickstock is the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. Her books include After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (1997), Thomas d'Aquin et la Quete Eucharistique (2001) and Repetition and Identity (2014). In addition, she was co-editor - with John Milbank and Graham Ward - of the influential collection Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (1998).

'This is emphatically an important book - one of the most innovative and wide-ranging essays in philosophical theology to appear in recent years - from a scholar quite capable of tackling the most sophisticated minds of secular academic philosophy on their own ground, and showing that theology has a serious contribution to make to our thinking about thinking. This seriously original work - which addresses the fundamental question of what we think we are doing/claiming when we say we are speaking truthfully - has the capacity to make a major difference in its field.' Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge; formerly Archbishop of Canterbury 'Aspects of Truth is an original, serious and demanding work that seeks to come to a novel metaphysical perspective on the nature of truth, a perspective both adequate to and informed by Christian liturgy. Over the course of ten chapters, it draws upon the insights and reflects upon the inadequacies it finds in the writings of a great pantheon of philosophical and theological figures. It crosses and re-crosses boundaries between analytic philosophy, continental philosophy and theology. It's an exciting journey to take, in Pickstock's company. Aspects of Truth is provocative and challenging, written in a style that crosses boundaries as much as its arguments. I can think of no other book quite like it.' Fraser McBride, University of Manchester 'Readers of Pickstock's work will recognize some of her perennial themes of liturgy, repetition and Platonism, but she utilizes them with a freshness that is only exceeded by the grand scope of her vision.' Tyler Holley, International Journal of Systematic Theology 'Many Christians, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI included, will doubtless welcome Pickstock's robust and philosophically rigorous defence of object truth. While sceptics are unlikely to warm to her insistence on the centrality of Christ, others will see a volume of this kind as exactly what the modern secular world needs.' Jonathan W. Chappell, The Furrow