Metaphysics is the study of the most general nature and basic structure of reality, and therefore the concepts of metaphysics, concepts like time, space, identity, resemblance, substance, property, fact, event, composition, possibility, etc., are the most fundamental concepts. Thus metaphysics is the most fundamental theoretical discipline.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-PereyraThe 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.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-PereyraFor bundles of universals can be in more than one place at the same time; so a bundle can have more than one instance; so there can be numerically distinct particulars sharing the same universals; so the principle of identity of indiscernibles is false.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-PereyraKnowledge has the form of a tree, and since metaphysics is the most fundamental one of the theoretical disciplines, it represents the roots of the tree.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-PereyraWhen I was eleven or twelve years old, I became for a while fixated on the question whether there could be two 'identical' stones. This is, of course, the question whether the principle of identity of indiscernibles is true and, as I formulated it then, I was bound to fall into confusion about it.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-PereyraThose who take knowledge to be a whole zoo of sub-disciplines will react to my giving metaphysics a privileged position in that zoo or to my thinking of knowledge as a tree, with more and less fundamental parts.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-PereyraThere 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.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra