Originile și evoluția concepțiilor filosofice asupra mentalității și imaginarului

Abstract

It is certain that our life cannot exist outside the mentality and the imaginary, they being the ones that allow the perception and understanding of human representations, of the way of the individual is relating to the reality in which he exists. The process of establishing, transforming and consolidating mentalities is one of the prominent topics at the heart of public debates in all countries of the world, but especially in transition countries, where the way citizens receive, process or filter information and relate immediately to realities, it is identified as one of the main obstacles that prevent or one of the factors that favor the production of a substantial social change. In this sense, this article presents a reflection on the need for progressive multidisciplinary research on the problem of collective mentality, from the perspective of collective imaginary and social representations, evoking, first of all, the essence of resources of meaning and functionality of the concept of mentality and of the related concepts (social imaginary, social representations, collective consciousness), from antiquity to the Renaissance.