Volume V (2022)
tokens, and that “invention” is a property only of types. 8 Given the oral nature of early poetry,
sometimes a given poem was extemporaneously invented as it was performed, in which case that
exact performance was the type — and location was important in defining its existence. In the
same vein, despite that fact it is claimed that Homer “invented” The Iliad and The Odyssey , his
work has been “h anded down to us in one thousand and a half ancient manuscripts and at least
two hundred medieval ones.” 9 It is likely that individuals invented their own versions of the
Homerian “token” that was the original story : as long as they stuck to key elements of rhyme,
rhythm, and theme, it could be counted as a manuscript of The Iliad and The Odyssey . Finally, in
his overall theory, Wollheim misses a key element of creation necessary for discussing the
ontological status of poetry — something that Thomasson addresses and Ribeiro modifies in her
proposal for the ontology of poetry.
To discuss the ontology of poetry, it is necessary to bring in a term that Amie Thomasson
created: the “abstract artifact.” Thomasson claims that, as different genres of literature seem to
“fall between the cracks of traditional category, systems accommodating them will require
acknowledging intervening categories for temporarily determined, dependent abstracta: abstract
artifacts created by h uman intentional activities.” 10 Poems say abstract things without an exact
spatio-temporal location (though there are exceptions to this as previously mentioned), but
unlike mathematical entities, like numbers, that are fixed and have always existed, a poem is
created in a certain time — in the way that a bowl is thrown by a potter — by that fact that it is
created by human activity. There are many things lacking spatio-temporal location but are a
distinct human creation such as websites or computer programs. This term is useful in discussing
8 Wollheim, 76. 9 Anna Christina Riberio, "The Spoken and the Written: An Ontology of Poems," in The Philosophy of Poetry , edited by John Gibson (Oxford University Press, 2015),135. 10 Thomasson, 90.
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