Aspects of Truth

What is 'truth'? The question that Pilate once put to Jesus was laced with dramatic irony. But when what is true and what is untrue have lately acquired a new and urgent currency, the question itself remains of crucial significance. Is truth, then, 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 with verve and lan, 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 trap 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.