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.

I would say I was a philosophical boy. Thoughts about 'identical stones' are the earliest philosophical thoughts I remember. But when I was a teenager I also thought about the more typical philosophical problems teenagers think about: the existence of god, the objectivity of morality, whether one can know that the external world exists.

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.

Knowledge 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.

The role of metaphysics in relation to other disciplines, whether philosophical or not and including the natural sciences, is thus a foundational role. Lack of clarity in the concepts of metaphysics implies lack of clarity in other disciplines - both theoretical and practical disciplines - employing those concepts or employing concepts that depend on those of metaphysics.

In my view the bundle theorist should say that when a bundle is located somewhere, there is an 'instance' of the bundle there. The instance is entirely constituted by the universals of the bundle. But the bundle and the instance are two distinct entities. Bundles of universals can be multiply located, but their instances cannot, and particulars are instances of a bundle of universals.

A truthmaker is an entity in virtue of which the proposition it makes true is true. And it is a necessary condition of being a truthmaker (though not a sufficient one) that a truthmaker necessitates the proposition it makes true.