What is Formal Ontology?

After briefly addressing the origin of the word ontology, I will ask what formal ontology might be. I will first argue that formal ontology is not the same as formalized or general ontology. In order to understand the meaning of the epithet "formal,� I will then look for a suitable way of distinguishing form from matter. Formal ontology will be shown to be formal insofar as it does not refer to concrete, singular entities. This implies that it cannot be the study of singular things, but also not the study of our knowledge of them. For in both cases, it would depend on empirical facts about concrete things. Rather, formal ontology is about the objectivity of objects, and in this sense, it is the study of the form that objects have only insofar as they are objects.