From phenomenology to formal ontology: How barry Smith and Kevin Mulligan made Husserl's descriptive psychology into a form of realism

In this paper I will discuss Barry Smith's and Kevin Mulligan's revision of Husserl's phenomenology, starting from the fact that many Italian scholars seem to follow them in a sense, by dealing with phenomenology as a sort of a priori ontology. Therefore, I will first reconstruct Smith's and Mulligan's attempt and its objectives, then I will show how it is rooted in the school of Brentano and, in particular, in Husserl's phenomenology. Finally, I will provide some arguments against this attempt: first of all that it does not attain a better description of the world, secondly that phenomenology does the job of formal ontology better than the latter.