The Ontic Return

JAMES E. FORD is Professor Emeritus in English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. He has focused on the philosophical foundations of critical theory with a special interest in intellectual revolutions, such as the 19thcentury re-evaluation of Euripides, examined in his "Rationalist Criticism of Greek Tragedy: The Nature, History," and "Influence of a Critical Revolution."

"The Ontic Return: The Current Epochal Shift from Meaning to Being" makes the large and challenging claim that Western culture is well along in the process of cycling out of the long-dominant linguistic orientation the Linguistic Turn - and into an ontic orientation, already dominant in several academic fields and spreading rapidly to all the others. The book further shows that this current shift is the latest recurrence in a series of similar cycles an ontic return. Provides as evidence analysis of both the internal, structural, mechanism of such fundamental ontological change and the external, circumstantial conditions of this latest revolution, as well as essays demonstrating the effects of the new ontological assumptions on fields such as philosophy, sociology, gender studies, religious studies, and the physical sciences. Shows the common reality underlying such recent developments as physicalism, neo realism, critical realism, new essentialism, new materialism, scientific realism, speculative realism, as well as the tendencies to reinterpret such figures as Marx, Kant, and Heidegger from ontic perspectives."