David Malet Armstrong
David Malet Armstrong | |
|---|---|
Armstrong receiving his doctorate of letters (h.c.) at Nottingham University, UK on 13 December 2007 | |
| Born | 8 July 1926 Melbourne, Australia |
| Died | 13 May 2014 (aged 87) Sydney, Australia |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | University of Sydney |
| Academic advisors | John Anderson |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy Australian realism Immanent realism Factualism Perdurantism (four-dimensionalism) |
| Main interests | Metaphysics, philosophy of mind |
| Notable ideas | Instantiation principle Quidditism Maximalist version of truthmaker theory |
David Malet Armstrong AO FAHA (8 July 1926 – 13 May 2014), often D. M. Armstrong, was an Australian philosopher. He is well known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the laws of nature.
Keith Campbell said that Armstrong's contributions to metaphysics and epistemology "helped to shape philosophy's agenda and terms of debate", and that Armstrong's work "always concerned to elaborate and defend a philosophy which is ontically economical, synoptic, and compatibly continuous with established results in the natural sciences".