Subject/Object

The couple of concepts subject/object involves philosophical approaches that are relevant to the intertwinement of logic, metaphysics, ethics, and psychology (Kobusch 1984; Karskens et al. 1998; Kible et al. 1998). During the Renaissance, some major contributions were proposed by the Aquinas commentator Tommaso de Vio Cardinal Cajetan, the humanist Petrus Ramus, the pure Aristotelian Cornelius Martini, the semi-Ramist Bartholomaeus Keckermann, and the lexicographer Rudolf Goclenius. Mostly, however, the discussion was led by Ramus and his followers, the Ramists, because of the role they played in exacerbating a discussion on the constitution of objectivity that was to have an impact on Cartesian and post-Cartesian theories of subjectivity. Finally, keeping in mind that Kant was familiar with the secunda Petri, i.e., with the second part of Ramus’s logic, namely, the theory of judgment, some common ground is recognizable on subject/object between Ramus and Kant as well. Decades and decades before Descartes, the issue of subjectivity arose as a consequence of the setting of domains of objects, which brought the momentous change that logic’s foundations were not in nature (as Plato and the Stoics assumed), but as a habit, within a thinking subject. Subject/object is about three questions: (1) Is logic a system based on nature or is in the human understanding as a habit? (2) What are the form and the matter of the object to be considered? (3) How does the human subject elaborate semantic models in accordance with the heuristic of each science (Pozzo 2012)?