ABSTRACT
It sounds and seems arrogant (as if I know all the answers), but in this paper I dare to proceed from the presumption that the world is undergoing profound transformations that are so deep and pervasive as to amount to a seismic ontological shift. While the common sense of our epoch – those fundamental premises by which people understand the nature of their circumstances, or what philosophers call our ontology – is new and still emerging,2 it is articulated in a variety of ways, some explicitly but many obscurely, and increasingly it is spreading everywhere – in every country through every walk of life and across all the layers of class and community that comprise global affairs. Among elites it is intuitively understood in some detail; among masses it is grasped in bare outline; but whatever the level of comprehension, the ontology is widely and intersubjectively shared across cultures and all the other boundaries that differentiate communities and peoples.
