Reality and Representation: The Problem

Reality is different, for each and every of us. Different is the manner in which we understand reality and also our personal representation of it. For some people reality is represented, simply, in everyday' s life, but for others the representation of reality is transformed into art or literature. Thinking somehow beyond Derrida' s own words, all of us can say is nothing outside reality. But also true is the fact that we live in the same world, and still we see different realities. Reality can be understood in way that links to views or parts of them. Reality represents the totality of all things, structures (actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not.Reality is not (only) philosophical term. Certain ideas from physics, sociology, literary or art criticism, and other fields shape various theories of reality, but following philosophy we can attach importance to this term and we can also deconstruct it. One such belief is that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality itself. More than that, owing to representation, people know and understand the and reality through the act of naming it. Signs are manipulated in order to make sense of the world. Thus, representation of reality has been associated with aesthetics (art) and semiotics (signs).By this special issue dedicated to Reality and Representation, International Journal on Humanistic Ideology tries to present different approaches of the same reality, philosophically speaking. The present issue brings together articles signed by reputed professors and researchers from Romania, United States, India and United Kingdom and covers different panels, from logic, cognitive science and semantics; recent history and its meaning or art interpretations to specific case analysis (Jewish Sapiential Literature or Indian Museums and their relevance for the representation of reality).The issue opens with Gardenforsy Conceptual Spaces and Affective Representations by Dana Sugu and Amita Chatterjee, from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, an article in which they try to examine an emotion episode from its elicitation to the differentiation into affective processes.It continues with Real World Semantics, very important article by Professor Ionel Narita, from University of Timicoara. The article speaks about the world as contradictory term, because, as we all know, is only world, the real one. In this case, as the author says, it follows that the possible semantics must be replaced with real semantics.The third article of this issue is written by Gregory Jones-Katz, from University of Wisconsin, and is entitled Rethinking Deconstruction in America. It is very well documented analysis of the centrality of the concept of history in Jacques Derrida' s and Paul de Man's works and also speaks about how reception of deconstruction was shaped in the United States.Petronia Petrar, from Babec-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, proposes us an analysis Towards Typology of Spatial Representations. The paper is concerned with a tentative categorisation of the various modes of representing space that have shaped and continue to shape modern identity. Both symbolic and allegorical space are described and so is the allegory of nostalgia, in order to show that one major difference between symbolic and allegorical spaces seems therefore to lie in their relationship with 'nature' . …