¹Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, USA

Correspondence: Betty M. Bayer, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, 210 Demarest, Women's Studies, Geneva, NY 14456, USA. E-mail: bayer@hws.edu

Abstract

If there is a new face to subjectivity, it may well be that of ontology. Where subjectivity once bracketed off questions of ontology (with the exception of visions of ontology operating in versions of subjectivity and epistemology), ontology now carries matters of subjectivity within a broader framework of ethics, meaning and becoming. Revisiting this historical submergence of ontology through the social psychological classic When Prophecy Fails, the paper inquires into how the split of epistemology and ontology was assumed fundamental to secularization, to repositioning knowledge and knower, world and wonder, and for which the question of prophecy played no small role. This revisiting asks: what did it mean to secure ideas of a rational psyche through oppositional registers of psychology vs religion or spirituality? If there is indeed an upturn in ontological interest, in approaches concerned with an "historical coming-into-being", these long-assumed fundamental splits will assume new significance to matters of subjectivity.