Concept

Matter

Overview

In physical science, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic particles. In everyday as well as scientific usage, matter generally includes atoms and anything made up of them, and any particles (or combination of particles) that act as if they have both rest mass and volume. However it does not include massless particles such as photons, or other energy phenomena or waves such as light or heat. Matter exists in various states (also known as phases). These include classical everyday phases such as solid, liquid, and gas – for example water exists as ice, liquid water, and gaseous steam – but other states are possible, including plasma, Bose–Einstein condensates, fermionic condensates, and quark–gluon plasma.

Usually, atoms can be imagined as a nucleus consisting of subatomic particles, protons and neutrons and a surrounding "cloud" of orbiting electrons that "take up space". However, this is only somewhat correct because subatomic particles and their properties are governed by their quantum nature, which means they do not act as everyday objects appear to act – they can act like waves as well as particles, and they do not have well-defined sizes or positions. In the Standard Model of particle physics, matter is not a fundamental concept because the elementary constituents of atoms are quantum entities which do not have an inherent "size" or "volume" in any everyday sense of the word. Due to the exclusion principle and other fundamental interactions, some "point particles" known as fermions (quarks, leptons), and many composites and atoms, are effectively forced to keep a distance from other particles under everyday conditions; this creates the property of matter which appears to us as matter taking up space.

For much of the history of the natural sciences, people have contemplated the exact nature of matter. The idea that matter was built of discrete building blocks, the so-called particulate theory of matter, appeared in both ancient Greece and ancient India. Early philosophers who proposed the particulate theory of matter include the Indian philosopher Kaṇāda (c. 6th century BCE), and the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers Leucippus (c. 490 BCE) and Democritus (c. 470–380 BCE).

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Matter is discussed.

Is mind emergent from events? If the former, is mind emergent from matter, or deducible from the properties of matter, or neither? If the latter, is matter emergent from mind or deducible from the properties of mind, or neither? Of course, if neither mind nor matter is emergent from events, these latter questions do not arise. Let us coin a word, “chrono-geography”, for the science which begins with events having…
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
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From this distinction between space and matter it follows, according to Locke, that there is such a thing as a vacuum, or that space is not necessarily a plenum of matter. Matter is that which fills space; but it is entirely indifferent to space whether or not it is filled. Space is occupied by matter, but there is no essential relation between them. Solidity is the essence of matter; emptiness is the characteristic…
John Dewey, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding
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The followers of Democritus aver that the vacuum, the atom, and the incorporeal substance are the first beings, and not obnoxious to passions. Aristotle and Plato affirm that matter is of that species which is corporeal, void of any form, species, figure, and quality, but apt to receive all forms, that she may be the nurse, the mother, and origin of all other beings. But they that do say that water, earth, air, and…
Plutarch, Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3
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Thus then by the indestructibility of Matter, we really mean the indestructibility of the _force_ with which Matter affects us. As we become conscious of Matter only through that resistance which it opposes to our muscular energy, so do we become conscious of the permanence of Matter only through the permanence of this resistance; as either immediately or mediately proved to us. And this truth is made manifest not…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
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The question “What is matter?” is of the kind that is asked by metaphysicians, and answered in vast books of incredible obscurity. But I am not asking the question as metaphysician: I am asking it as a person who wants to find out what is the moral of modern physics, and more especially of the theory of relativity.
Bertrand Russell, The A B C of Relativity
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Matter

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Matter

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Opposing perspectives

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