Provocative and sophisticated, Truth in Aquinas is a fascinating re-evaluation of a key area - truth - in the work of Thomas Aquinas.

Provocative and sophisticated, Truth in Aquinas is a fascinating re-evaluation of a key area - truth - in the work of Thomas Aquinas. Milbank and Pickstock's provocative but strongly argued position is that many of the received views of Aquinas as philosopher and theologian are wrong.
This compelling and controversial work builds on the amazing reception of Radical Orthodoxy (Routledge, 1999).

Radical Orthodoxy is a new wave of theological thinking that aims to reclaim the world by situating its concerns and activities within a theological framework, re-injecting modernity with theology.
This collection of papers is essential reading for anyone eager to understand religion, theology, and philosophy in a completely new light.

eBook available with sample pages: HB:0415196981

Radical Orthodoxy is a new wave of theological thinking that aims to reclaim the world by situating its concerns and activities within a theological framework, re-injecting modernity with theology.
This collection of papers is essential reading for anyone eager to understand religion, theology, and philosophy in a completely new light.

eBook available with sample pages: PB:041519699X EB:0203046196

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.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. Repetition and Identity offers a theory of the existing thing as such. A thing only has identity and consistency when it has already been repeated, but repetition summons difference and the shadow invocation of a connecting sign. In contrast to the perspectives of Post-structuralism, Catherine Pickstock proposes that signs are part of reality, and that they truthfully express the real. She also proposes that non-identical repetition involves analogy, rather than the Post-structuralist combination of univocity and equivocity, or of rationalism with scepticism. This proposal, which is happy for reality to make sense, involves, however, a subjective decision which is to be poetically performed. A wager is laid upon the possibility of a consistency which sustains the subject, in continuity with the elusive consistency of nature. This wager is played out in terms of a performative argument concerning the existential stances open to human beings. It is concluded that the individual sustains this quest within the context of an inter-subjective search for an historical consistency of culture. But can ethical consistency, and the harmonisation of this with an aesthetic surplus of an 'elsewhere', invoked by the sign, be achieved without a religious gesture? And can this gesture avoid a tragic tension between ethical commitment and religious renunciation? Pickstock suggests a Kierkegaardian re-reading of the Patristic categories of 'recapitulation' and 'reconstitution' can reconcile this tension. The quest for the identity and consistency of the thing leads us from the subject through fiction and history and to sacred history, to shape an ontology which is also a literary theory and a literary artefaction.

As Catherine Pickstock so forcefully demonstrates in her brilliant introduction to this new publication of Beauty Looks After Herself, for 600 or more years, the Real has been progressively stripped of transcendental content, so that today an "unbearable lightness of being" presents us with the terrible spectacle of numberless possibilities evacuated of all substantive content. A middlebrow landscape of normal nihilism surrounds us at every turn.

Eric Gill saw through our dilemma long ago. Here, in essays on industrialism, architecture, stone-carving, lettering, clothes, philosophies of art, and much else, Gill emerges as the unabashed proponent of "every man an artist" - "every man as the crafter of the liturgy of the ordinary," as Pickstock so aptly puts it. In these essays is issued a call for the recovery of the Real in all its glory, especially the transcendental of Beauty, in which Truth and Goodness coinhere - a call to return to the Real once again its rightful and actual plenitude.