Husserl’s Formal Ontology

Formal ontology [formale Ontologie] is, so to speak, an indispensable part of Husserl’s phenomenology, he never ceases to pay attention to this theme during his whole academic career. With respect to his published works, Husserl’s investigations into formal ontology mainly appear in Logical investigations(1900/01), Ideas 1(1913) and Formal and transcendental logic(1929), other texts concerning this topic never go beyond the framework established by these three works. Formal ontology goes through several phases of development, and plays very important parts in different problematic area.In Husserl’s view, a genuine philosophy must follow the idea of the theory of science [Wissenschaftslehr], and is supposed to become a rigorous science on which the general sciences can be founded. At different stages of thinking, the idea of the science of science manifest itself respectively as pure logic, science of essences, and the full idea of formal logic. Formal ontology is precisely put forward under the request of this idea.Husserl argues that formal ontology is a pure formal theory of the object in general or anything whatever [Gegenstand überhaupt], it investigates into the categories of logic and the axioms based on them.In this sense, any possible object can be defined with the categories of formal ontology, and further becomes the subject of a true judgment.Among the categories of formal objects, the idea of whole and part, and the formal theory about them are important in particular, because only by which can formal ontology be understood as an effective tool of analysis.From the perspective of logic, there is an essential relation between formal ontology and formal apophantics, of which a complete formal logic consists. Apophantic analytics is the theme of traditional formal logic,which is still lack of the research on the substrate of judgment, therefore tobecome a logic of truth, the formal logic needs a formal ontology.From the perspective of ontology, both formal and material ontology belong to the ontology of essences, the distinction between them is derived from the difference between formal and material essence. Formal ontology lays down the rule of formal essence of anything whatever, while material ontology lays down the rule of material essence of any regional object.Due to the formal universality, formal ontology is superior to the material ontology and to the ontology of realities. And as a science of essences, it lays foundation for the sciences of fact.From the perspective of phenomenology, all the problems relevant to formal ontology must be included in the scope of phenomenological exploration. At the stage of descriptive phenomenology, Husserl investigated into the phenomenological origin of the categories of formal ontology by means of categorial intuition. And at the stage of transcendental phenomenology, he excluded formal ontology in the natural attitude by phenomenological reduction at first, and then explored it in transcendental consciousness and ultimately reintegrated it into the transcendental ontology. Husserl claims that only transcendental phenomenology could be the genuine ontology of essences, and only in terms of the theory of intentionality, formal ontology can be finally clarified. However, formal ontology plays its own part in the constitution of phenomenology as well.This paper shows that Husserl’s study of formal ontology is always intertwined with his logic, ontology, and phenomenology. And what de facto inspires this study implicitly is the search for the possibility of knowledge. Moreover, this paper also indicates that formal ontology in a certain way mirrors the transformation of Husserl’s phenomenology from the static description to genetic constitution. For Husserl, the investigation into formal ontology will inevitably lead to the transcendental phenomenology, for only the latter is the genuine source of all of the knowledge and sciences.