In certain cases involving personhood, subjects and objects can be considered interchangeable where each label is applied only from one or the other point of view.
Broadly construed, the word object names a maximally general category, whose members are eligible for being referred to, quantified over and thought of.
By uncovering this paradox he then provides a solution (pratītyasamutpāda – "dependent origination") that lies at the very root of Buddhist praxis.
[5] The formal separation between subject and object in the Western world corresponds to the dualistic framework, in the early modern philosophy of René Descartes, between thought and extension (in common language, mind and matter).
An attribute of an object is called a property if it can be experienced (e.g. its color, size, weight, smell, taste, and location).
Subject as a key-term in thinking about human consciousness began its career with the German idealists, in response to David Hume's radical skepticism.
Hume had offered the following proposal: Kant, Hegel and their successors sought to flesh out the process by which the subject is constituted out of the flow of sense impressions.
Hegel, for example, stated in his Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit that a subject is constituted by "the process of reflectively mediating itself with itself.
"[8] Hegel begins his definition of the subject at a standpoint derived from Aristotelian physics: "the unmoved which is also self-moving" (Preface, para.
The Hegelian subject may therefore be characterized either as "self-restoring sameness" or else as "reflection in otherness within itself" (Preface, para.
Charles S. Peirce of the late-modern American philosophical school of pragmatism, defines the broad notion of an object as anything that we can think or talk about.
[9] In a general sense it is any entity: the pyramids, gods,[3] Socrates,[3] the nearest star system, the number seven, a disbelief in predestination, or the fear of cats.
The thinking of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud provided a point of departure for questioning the notion of a unitary, autonomous Subject, which for many thinkers in the Continental tradition is seen as the foundation of the liberal theory of the social contract.
[citation needed] Freud's explorations of the unconscious mind added up to a wholesale indictment of Enlightenment notions of subjectivity.
[citation needed] Among the most radical re-thinkers of human self-consciousness was Martin Heidegger, whose concept of Dasein or "Being-there" displaces traditional notions of the personal subject altogether.
[10] Jacques Lacan, inspired by Heidegger and Ferdinand de Saussure, built on Freud's psychoanalytic model of the subject, in which the split subject is constituted by a double bind: alienated from jouissance when they leave the Real, enters into the Imaginary (during the mirror stage), and separates from the Other when they come into the realm of language, difference, and demand in the Symbolic or the Name of the Father.
You might be inclined to suppose that all by himself he would give truth to the statement ‘Socrates existed’, but as a matter of fact that is a mistake.
", Thomas Nagel famously argued that explaining subjective experience—the "what it is like" to be something—is currently beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, because scientific understanding by definition requires an objective perspective, which, according to Nagel, is diametrically opposed to the subjective first-person point of view.
These additional features of subjective experience are often referred to as qualia (see Frank Cameron Jackson and Mary's room).