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Paradigmatic revisions in the modes of representation in art are usually part of broader revisions of the cognitive structures with which particular historical-cultural era conceptualizes knowledge of the universe. With new knowledge and changed social conditions, new cognitive structures evolve and are expressed simultaneously in the multiple cognitive endeavors of the broad culture including art, literature, science and philosophy. II. C. Historical Roots and Influential Developments in Philosophy The philosophical influences, cultural conditions and different translations of Freud’s opus that shaped psychoanalysis in relation to the concept of representation contributed greatly to specific directions through lexical and semantic choices. For example, the German word ‘Vorstellung’, which is translated in English by ‘idea’, is very different from the French translation which is ‘représentation’ (Téssier 2005). In philosophy , representation has undergone a significant historical development. In Plato (375BCE/1985), it is defined as a reflection in the soul of the image derived from the real object. (Essential universal unchanging representations of objects and qualities, transcending time and space are called Forms.) In the Allegory of the Cave, the shadows represent distorted and blurred copies of reality one can perceive through the senses, while the objects under the Sun represent the true forms of objects that one can only perceive through reason. Aristotle (335BCE/2001; 350BCE/2006) conceives representation instead as arising from the interplay between sensation, or sensorial perception, memory and thought. Plato’s Cave allegory of objectifying reason versus incompleteness of knowledge via senses, continues with Descartes’ Rationalism. Descartes (1644/1647/1982) accords primacy to ideas, or innate representations, produced by the intellectus and largely independent of sensory experience of external reality. While adopting some of Plato’s terminology, Descartes does not simply extend Plato’s ideas. While Plato took ideas to be the things represented, Descartes viewed ideas as the vehicles of representation, as the items doing the representing. Akin to Aristotle, David Hume (1739-40/1978) stipulates that “nothing is ever really present to the mind, besides its own perceptions” (p.197). Yet for representation to take place, some form of resemblance between that which represents and that which is represented is required. For Hume, perceptions are fundamentally and essentially imagistic, and resemblance is to be understood in terms of images. Thus the representational power in the mind is in the imagination, not in the intellect. Immanuel Kant (1781/87/1998) distinguishes between "intuitions" (based on sensory experiences) and "concepts" (mental categories). His ‘transcendental aesthetic’ deals with how space and time shape our representations, and ‘transcendental logic’ focuses on the role of categories in structuring our understanding. For Kant, representation is essential for the possibility of both experience and knowledge. Besides Hume and Kant, indirectly influential were British Empiricists John Locke and Thomas Hartle y, who highlighted the importance of elements of empirical experience, in addition to, or over, rational thought as a principal source of knowledge about the world and oneself. Later elaboration of empiricism in the work of James Mill, and of his son , ‘radical
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