Matter is one of the fundamental concepts in both science and philosophy. The main question of philosophy, which will never be finally resolved, is associated with the priority of consciousness or matter. In different philosophical systems, the concept of matter was filled with different meanings.
The first thinker to use the term "matter" was the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. In Plato's philosophy, an important role was played by the idea of the "world of ideas" opposed to the "world of things" and preceding it. From Plato's point of view, matter is a substratum of things. Thus, together with the concept of matter, the opposition of the material to the ideal was born.
Paradoxically, the philosopher who led the concept of matter was an idealist - he considered the ideal to be primary in relation to matter. But there were also materialist philosophers in antiquity - in particular, Democritus. He not only declared matter the only existing reality, but also thought about its structure. According to Democritus, matter consists of atoms - the smallest indivisible particles. This philosophical trend, which considers matter as the only reality, is called materialism.
Aristotle considered matter as an eternal, uncreable and indestructible substance. Matter itself is only a potential existence; it becomes real only when combined with form. This concept of matter was inherited by the philosophy of the Middle Ages.
The concepts of matter in the philosophy of modern times are very diverse. From the point of view of sensationalism, matter is everything that affects the senses. T. Hobbes distinguishes between matter correlated with form (body) and “matter without form”. Some idealist philosophers - in particular, J. Berkeley - deny the existence of matter. From the point of view of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, matter exists, manifesting itself in specific objects and phenomena.
At the beginning of the 20th century, when scientific discoveries forced to radically reconsider the ideas about matter that had existed for many years within the framework of classical physics, many idealistic theories appeared based on reasoning about the "disappearance of matter": if ideas about the nature of matter can change so dramatically, then matter as such does not exist. These concepts were opposed by dialectical materialism. According to this concept, matter is eternal, infinite and inexhaustible, not matter itself can disappear, but only the limit of human knowledge about it.
Within the framework of dialectical materialism, the definition of matter was born, formulated by VI Lenin: "Objective reality that exists independently of our consciousness and is given to us in sensations." This definition cannot be called irreproachable, because not all levels of organization of matter are accessible to sensations - for example, at the atomic level, they do not work.
Modern philosophy considers matter as an objective reality that exists in two forms - matter and field. The fundamental properties of matter are space, time and motion. Movement means all the variety of changes. Five forms of motion of matter are distinguished: physical motion, chemical, mechanical, biological and social. None of these forms can be reduced to another. For example, uprisings and wars can be explained in terms of social patterns, but not biological ones.
