Physical objects, physical theories and what is physical in physicalism

Many failed attempts to solve the problem of characterizing what is physical in physicalism were based on one or another aspect of our (cluster) concept of physical, such as the intuitive notion of physical object or the notion of physical as corresponding to the subject matter of physics. The paper presents an original attempt to solve the mentioned problem by considering our concept of physical in a more comprehensive way. It argues that the intuitive notion of physical object plays a role in determining an explanatory task of current physics. Since ideal physics is an idealization of current physics in respect to the success in the pursuit of its aims, we know an explanatory task of the ideal physics and, thus, part of its content. By appealing to ideal physics, whose content is known to us to a certain extent, the paper attempts to characterize what is physical in physicalism.