Best of us all the best he be leic, go go, the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with

the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode, Don't Picture

this, Iconoplasm. There is a nice though presumably apocryphal anecdote told about Picasso.

A man asks him why don't you paint people the way they really look?

The artist asks what he means and the man opens his wallet and produces a photo, like this picture

of my wife, he says.

She's remarkably small, says Picasso, and surprisingly flat.

The story draws our attention to the fact that an image of something is never exactly like

the thing it represents.

If you say that a painting is a good likeness of your mother, you don't mean that it

resembles her in the way that an identical twin would, or a clone in a science fiction film.

The picture might be blurry or in black and white, as well as small and flat, yet still seem to capture your mother, even to be your mother in some sense.

Thus, if someone sees the picture on your wall and says, who's that?

You would just say, that's my mother.

Pictures of people also elicit the same emotions that the people themselves would.

Provoking such responses as kissing the photograph of one's mother or using the picture of one's enemy for target practice at a shooting range.

Yet of course we know that the picture is not genuinely the same as the person.

This is why you wouldn't be arrested for attempted murder for shooting at

your enemy's picture and why you don't expect your mom's photo to kiss you back.

Here we have one of the central questions of the branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.

How exactly do representations relate to the things they depict?

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