ways of doing it, but it is wrong to project it far into the past: it did not exist at the turn of the century and only became clearly apparent after the Second World War. I recently taught at an American university on the his tory of philosophy from Balzano to Husserl. The course title had to come from a fixed pool and gave trouble. Was it philosophical logic, the nine teenth century, or phenomenology? A logic title would connote over this period Frege, Russell, Carnap, perhaps a mention of Boole: not continental enough. The nineteenth century? The century of Kant's successors: Fichte,...

ways of doing it, but it is wrong to project it far into the past: it did not exist at the turn of the century and only became clearly apparent after the Second World War. I recently taught at an American university on the his tory of philosophy from Balzano to Husserl. The course title had to come from a fixed pool and gave trouble. Was it philosophical logic, the nine teenth century, or phenomenology? A logic title would connote over this period Frege, Russell, Carnap, perhaps a mention of Boole: not continental enough. The nineteenth century? The century of Kant's successors: Fichte,...

Formal ontology combines two ideas, one originating with Husserl, the other with Frege: that of ontology of the formal aspects of all objects, irrespective of their particular nature, and ontology pursued by employing the tools of modern formal disciplines, notably logic and semantics. These two traditions have converged in recent years and this is the first collection to encompass them as a whole in a single volume. It assembles essays from authors around the world already widely known for their work in formal ontology, and illustrates that through the application of formal methods the...