Formal Ontology

✍ Scribed by Jani Hakkarainen; Markku Keinänen

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 82
• Series: Elements in Metaphysics
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Formal ontology as a main branch of metaphysics investigates categories of being. In the formal ontological approach to metaphysics, these ontological categories are analysed by ontological forms. This analysis, which the Element illustrates by some category systems, provides a tool to assess the clarity, exactness and intelligibility of different category systems or formal ontologies. It discusses critically different accounts of ontological form in the literature. Of ontological form, the authors propose a character-neutral relational account. In this metatheory, ontological forms of entities are their standings in internal relations whose holding is neutral on the character of their relata. These relations are 'formal ontological relations'. The Element concludes by showing that our metatheory is useful for understanding categorial fundamentality/non-fundamentality, different formal ontologies, and for unifying metaphysical questions.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Formal Ontology
Contents
1 Introduction: Against Fantology
2 A Very Short History of Formal Ontology
2.1 Edmund Husserl
2.2 Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden
3 Contemporary Formal Ontology
3.1 Formal Ontological Theories
3.2 Ontological Form and Category
3.3 Lowe’s Strong Essentialism
4 Our Metatheory of Formal Ontology
4.1 Ontological Form: The Character-Neutral Relational Account
4.1.1 Ontological Form
4.1.2 Generic Identity
4.1.3 Responses to Possible Objections
4.1.4 Internality of Character-Neutral Relations
4.2 Formal Ontological Relations and Ontological Form versusBeing
4.2.1 Formal Ontological Relations, Their Reality, and Different Types
4.2.2 The Ground and Fundamentality of FORs
4.2.3 Distinguishing Ontological Form from Being
4.3 Categories
4.3.1 Category Membership
4.3.2 Existence and Reality of Categories
5 What Can We Do with Our Metatheory?
5.1 Formal Ontological Fundamentality vs Non-fundamentality
5.1.1 Our Proposal
5.1.2 Analyzing Formal Ontologies in Terms of Our Proposal
5.2 Our Metatheory and Our Trope Theory
5.3 What Is Metaphysics?
5.3.1 General Metaphysics
5.3.2 Ontology and Formal Ontology
5.3.3 Unifying Metaphysics by General Metaphysics and Formal Ontology
6 Conclusion
References
Acknowledgments