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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.