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.

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.

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.

For 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.

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.

Those 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.

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