Volume V (2022)
extensively on ontological distinctions and provides a sound overview of the conversation about
literary ontology. Thomasson puts forward the view that “works of music and literature seem to
depend for their existence on certain human intentional states without being identifiable either
with the imaginary creation of individual minds.” 2 This is a view that works well with literature
(and will work well with poetry), but there are other contradictory, past views worth briefly
noting as well. Various philosophers such as Gregory Currie have argued for action-centered
views of art, where the work itself is the discovery of a given structure but can never be
perceivable by observers, “only re - constructed.” 3 Similarly, R.G. Collingwood’s theory faces the
same consequence: that the work itself can only be reconstructed by the viewer. 4 A popular past
view is Richard Wollheim’s ontological theory of literature, where he attempts to tackle what we
have to accept in the ontology of a given work and concludes that different types of art should
have different ontological statuses. He creates a type/token distinction, where all works of
literature are types and all additional copies are tokens. 5 Wollheim argues against the physical
object hypothesis and says that a physical object or class of physical objects can encompass
literature, because “There is no object in space and time that can be picked out and thought of
as… a novel.” 6 For his notable type/token distinction, Wollheim’s reasoning is simple: it is
impossible to identify Ulysses as a novel with a particular copy because even when the
manuscript is lost, Ulysses can survive. 7 While Wollheim’s view is sound for literature, there are
incongruencies with poetry in his theory that give evidence that the two may be ontologically
distinct. For example, Wollheim says that properties of location in space and time pertain only to
2 Amie L. Thomasson, “The Ontology of Art,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics , edited by Peter Kivy, (Germany: Wiley, 2009), 90. 3 Thomasson, 83. 4 Thomasson, 83. 5 Richard A. Wollheim, Art and its Objects , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 80.
6 Wollheim, 4. 7 Wollheim, 7.
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