Husserl's conception of formal ontology

Abstract

The concept of formal ontology was first developed by Husserl. It concerns problems relating to the notions of object, substance, property, part, whole, predication, nominalization, etc. The idea of formal ontology is present in many of Husserl’s works, with minor changes. This paper provides a reconstruction of such an idea. Husserl’s proposal is faced with contemporary logical orthodoxy and it is presented also an interpretative hypothesis, namely that the original difference between the general perspective of usual model theory and formal ontology is grounded in the fact that this latter starts from an intended interpretation and not from the set of all the possible interpretations