It may be useful to make a distinction between formalism and substantivism. When doing formalism, you push the substance out of your mind and keep only the form. And when doing substantivism, you do the opposite: You push the form out of your mind and keep only the substance. For example, doing formalism in mathematics means ignoring the semantics of the notation and paying attention only to the syntax.

Depending on the historical context, the zeitgeist may be either more formalist or more substantivist. For example, British empiricism came about immediately after English and the other vernaculars of Europe replaced Latin in scholarship. That may not be a coincidence: As Morris Cohen argued in Reason and Nature (1931), that change in language led scholars to try to take the old insights preserved in Latin and translate them into English, French, etc., and the failure to do so in many cases shows that much of Latin-based scholarship was form without substance. British empiricism, being radically substantivist in spirit, was one of the most important reactions to that.