Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra Quotes

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 difference between resemblance nominalism and class nominalism is that the former, but not the latter, brings in resemblance to account for the truthmakers of the propositions in question.

Imperfect communities show that being a maximal resemblance class is not sufficient for being a property.

By arguing that the bundle theory does not entail and is not committed in any way to the principle of identity of indiscernibles, I have thereby defended the bundle theory from a traditional objection to it.

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.

I decided to do philosophy at university, with a view to becoming a professional philosopher. Being a rather unstable character, at some points I had doubts about becoming a professional philosopher, but the example of two of my teachers, Ezequiel de Olaso and Juan Rodriguez Larreta, made me confirm my original decision.

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

When 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I do not believe in the bundle theory anyway. The bundle theory postulates universals and I do not believe in them; so I do not believe in the bundle theory.

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.