Catherine Pickstock

After Writing provides a significant contribution to the growing genre of works which offers a challenge to modern and postmodern accounts of Christianity.

On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy

After Writing

John Milbank

This volume presents a re-evaluation of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. It combines a sophisticated understanding of contemporary thought, modern and postmodern, with a theological perspective that looks back to the origins of the church.

Truth in Aquinas

This bold new work discusses truth, and the value of a metaphysical approach to truth, from philosophical and theological perspectives.

A New Religious Metaphysics

Aspects of Truth

Graham Ward

Radical Orthodoxy is a remarkable collection of papers that aims to reclaim the world by situating concerns and activities within a theological framework.

A New Theology

Radical Orthodoxy

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.

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.

The Literary Agenda

Repetition and Identity

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.

A Short Guide to Plato

In this book, Catherine Pickstock offers philosophico-theological proposals to the field of literary theory. To older Post-structuralist concerns with the indeterminacy of the sign, and newer ones with naturalism and theBody, she adds dimensions of ontology and theology. To demonstrate her claim that the mystery of things can only be unravelled through the repetitions of fiction, history, inhabited subjectivity and revealed event, sheperformsthe argument that her text seeks to articulate. Thereby she offers not just a work of theory, but a new direction for philosophy.

Radical Orthodoxyis a remarkable collection of papers that aims to reclaim the world by situating concerns and activities within a theological framework.

Catherine Pickstock

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