What is an object. A few philosophical remarks

In philosophy, the concept of the object was finally formed only in the middle of the 4th century BC, in the classical era of Plato and Aristotle. Before that, numerous philosophical researches concerned mainly explanations of cosmological and ethical questions. The problems of cognition of the surrounding world were not particularly affected. Interestingly, before the birth of the ideal world of Plato, none of the Greek sages shared the world in which man lives, and the individual perception of this world. In other words, the surrounding things, phenomena and actions of people in the pre-Platonic era were not "external" to the philosophizing ancient observer. Accordingly, for him there was neither an object nor a subject-in the epistemological, metaphysical or ethical meaning of these concepts.

Plato did a mental revolution when he managed to demonstrate that in fact there are three independent worlds: the world of things, the world of ideas and the world of ideas about things and ideas. This approach forced us to consider the usual cosmological hypotheses differently. Instead of defining the primary source of life, the description of the surrounding world and the explanation of how we perceive this world come first. Accordingly, there is a need to clarify what an object is. And also what his perception is. According to Plato, the object is what the person's view is directed to, that is, "external" in relation to the observer. Individual perception of the object was accepted as a subject. Hence it was concluded that two different people may have opposite views on the object, and therefore the external world (objects of the world) are perceived subjectively. Objective, or ideal, can only be a world of ideas.

Aristotle, in turn, introduces the principle of variability. This approach is fundamentally different from the Platonic approach. In determining what an object is, it turned out that the world of substances (things) is divided into two components: form and matter. And "matter" was understood only physically, that is, it was described exclusively through empirical experience, whereas the form was endowed with metaphysical properties and applied exclusively to the problems of epistemology (the theory of knowledge). In this respect, the object was the physical world and its description.

Such a dual understanding of the object - physical and metaphysical - did not change over the next two millennia. Only the accents of perception changed. Take, for example, the medieval Christian mentality. The world here is a manifestation of the will of God. The question of what an object is, was not raised at all: only God could have an objective view, and people, due to their imperfection, had only subjective positions. Therefore, material reality, even if recognized as such (Francis Bacon), was still subjective, disintegrating into separate, autonomous from each other, substances. The concept of the object was born later, in the new time and the era of classicism, when the surrounding reality ceased to be perceived solely as an object of philosophizing. The world became objective for a rapidly developing science.

Today the statement of the question "What is an object?" Is rather methodological than philosophical in nature. An object is usually understood as an area of research - and this can be either an object or thing, and a separate property of it, or even an abstract understanding of this property. Another thing is that often the object is described from the subjective positions, especially when determining the essence of new phenomena. By the way, think: interactive communities and Internet networks - what in this case is the object, and what is the subject?

And in this sense it is clear: the question of what an object is is reduced solely to the problem of scientific legitimacy. If the proposed concept or theory is recognized, then we can witness the birth of a new object. Or, conversely, the deobjectivation of a thing or phenomenon. In this world everything is relative.