Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra Quotes

#1. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#2. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#3. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

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

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#5. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#6. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#7. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

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

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#9. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#10. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#11. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#12. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#13. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#14. 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.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#15. The problem of how to characterise the properties that would trivialise the principle is one of the hardest problems concerning the principle of identity of indiscernibles and one the problems to which least attention has been paid of.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

#16. I think there is a metaphysical problem of the relation between mind and body. Thinking that there is no metaphysical dimension to the problem is an error.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra