Markku Keinänen

This edited volume contains philosophical essays on three central topics in analytic philosophy: the nature of reality in which we live, the nature of truth of claims or thoughts about reality, and the nature of language expressing these thoughts and referring to reality. The volume also contains novel philosophical reflection on the nature of philosophy itself. The authors include leading philosophers and younger colleagues of Panu Raatikainen, Professor of Philosophy at Tampere University. This Festschrift offers a mosaic overview of his multifaceted contributions in philosophy by bringing together essays from his teachers, students, friends, and colleagues past and present. The articles engage in critical, constructive dialogue with Raatikainen's key ideas and arguments.

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. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.