A pregnant silence : contemporary apophaticism and virtues ethics.

This dissertation surveys and critiques the ethical consequences of the contemporary revival of apophaticism. It examines representative examples of a continuum of contemporary apophatic thought—primarily Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, Richard Kearney, Jean-Luc Marion, and Denys Turner—and assesses the ethical implications of the accounts themselves as well as the compatibility of their accounts with virtues ethics. It concludes with a study of Bonaventure and argues that his Christocentric Exemplarism allows him to harmonize the tensions between both the apophatic and cataphatic and between the relationship of apophaticism with virtues ethics. I suggest that the centrality of humility in Bonaventure’s thought offers rich resources for the contemporary theological reconsideration of metaphysics and ethics.