David Malet Armstrong | |
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![]() Armstrong receiving his doctorate of letters (h.c.) at Nottingham University, UK on 13 December 2007 | |
Born | Melbourne, Australia | 8 July 1926
Died | 13 May 2014 Sydney, Australia | (aged 87)
Alma mater | University of Sydney |
Era | 20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic philosophy Australian realism Immanent realism[1] Factualism Perdurantism (four-dimensionalism)[2] |
Academic advisors | John Anderson |
Main interests | Metaphysics, philosophy of mind |
Notable ideas | Instantiation principle Quidditism[3] Maximalist version of truthmaker theory |
David Malet Armstrong AO FAHA (8 July 1926 – 13 May 2014),[4] 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.[5]
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".[6]