At one point I took a copy of Berkeley's Principles from my father's library. That was the first philosophy book I read. I found it fascinating and wanted to read more philosophy.

Leibniz believed in freedom, both divine and human, and he thought that contingency was a necessary condition of freedom. That is, if an agent A acts freely when choosing X, then A's choosing X cannot be necessary. But there are some elements in his philosophy that seem to make contingency impossible.

The huge majority of philosophers seem to think that including impure properties in the range of the quantifiers of the principle would make the principle trivial. I have argued that it does not.

There are different interpretations of the problem of universals. I understand it as the problem of giving the truthmakers of propositions to the effect that a certain particular is such and such, e.g. propositions like 'this rose is red'. Others have interpreted it as a problem about the ontological commitments of such propositions or a problem about what those propositions mean.

The parallelism, or denial of any causation between mind and body, derives basically, and fallaciously, from a theory of substances as having complete concepts that include everything that is true of them.

Those who think that metaphysics is just misunderstood grammar will react to my giving metaphysics some place or another in the system of knowledge.

Although I felt I was quite good at criticising a philosophical position, I was not very good at defending and making a case for a philosophical position.