Nominalism was the first topic of talkPOPc (then, called just POPc, before we discovered POPc was a popular chemical compound…), and it ran from 2012-14. It began when I published a book on Nelson Goodman titled Nominalism and Its Aftermath (this was a re-working of my PhD dissertation) and finished a body of artwork around the same topic.
talkPOPc began, accidentally almost, in 2012 with an exhibition I did at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It differed from the usual exhibition in that I devoted one room to philosophers: they were the first talkPOPc Resident Philosophers, though we didn’t know it at the time. Noël Carroll (the well-known philosophy of film expert from CUNY’s Graduate Center), Lindsay Fiorelli (another aesthetician now at Claremont), David Post (technically a professor of law who was also Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s clerk, but philosophically inclined!) and a few PhD students from UPenn milled around and answered questions from those who had come to the opening. The exhibition was the visual work I’d done around the topic of nominalism and Nelson Goodman. There were drawings (depicting the whole of ontology broken apart into individual qualia), a video (about Goodman), and an artists book (about the problem with Goodman’s metaphorical exemplification). All in all, a bit heady. Therefore, (clearly) the need for The Philosophers.
Amazingly so, the conversation room was buzzing with people. Milling around, everyone was asking one or another of the philosophers questions about nominalism, or Goodman, or platonism, etc. People engaged with one another. I thought, “how amazingly cool just to focus on people’s conversations.”
And so talkPOPc was born.
To say a few words about Nominalism itself: it is the point of view that only concrete particulars exist and that universals do not. Universals are those heady things that Plato advocated – immaterial, permanent, and mind-independent. Called “the one over the many”: the one Virtue, the one Beauty. All beautiful things are instances of The One. And all the (many) material things in the world are just pale versions of the splendor and perfection of the Universals.
People debate this. For thousands of years. And people divide still, to this day. Some lean toward nominalism, some toward platonism. No matter. There does not lie the answer. We at talkPOPc say the answer is to talk to others, to listen. To listen. And so we did! Often in bars in Bushwick (Brooklyn, NY), different philosophers (our wonderful Resident Philosophers!) would sit and have formally have conversations with individuals, one-on-one. Those individuals would then post their thoughts. Building thought. One thought at a time.
ConverseThoughts: The Artwork
Dena Shottenkirk. Nelson Goodman Qualia Grid, (2010) mixed media
Dena Shottenkirk, xya, 2010
Dena Shottenkirk, A Night with Nelson Goodman, Video, 2010
Publication
Nelson Goodman’s disparate writings are often written about only within their own particular discipline, such that the epistemology is discussed in contrast to others’ epistemology, the aesthetics is contrasted with more traditional aesthetics, and the ontology and logic is viewed in contrast to both other contemporary philosophers and to Goodman’s historical predecessors. This book argues that that is not an adequate way to view Goodman. The separate disciplines of ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics should be viewed as sequential steps within his thought, such that each provides the ground rules for the next section and, furthermore, providing the reasons for limitations on the terms available to the subsequent writing(s). This is true not merely because this is the general chronology of his writing, but more importantly because within his metaphysics lies Goodman’s basic nominalist ontology and logic, and it is upon those principles that he builds his epistemology and, furthermore, it is the sum of both the metaphysics and the epistemology, with the nominalist principle as the guiding force, which constructs the aesthetics. At the end of each section of this book, the consequent limitations imposed on his terms and concepts available to him are explicated, such that, by the end of the book, the book delineates the constraints imposed upon the aesthetics by both the metaphysics and the epistemology.
This book will benefit not only the professionals in the field of philosophy, but will also help both graduate and upper level undergraduate students understand Goodman’s disparate writings within their proper context, and hopefully will also encourage them to view philosophical thinking in a less truncated and departmentalized way.