Armstrong, D. M.

Abstract

David Mallet Armstrong (born 1926) would have had an international reputation for his work on Berkeley (Armstrong 1960) and in epistemology (Armstrong 1961, 1962, 1973), but it is his contributions to metaphysics that will go down in history. Rigorous metaphysics as practiced by Bertrand Russell, G. F. Stout and C. D. Broad, in England, by D. C. Williams in the U.S., and by Armstrong's teacher, John Anderson, was decidedly out of fashion in the early 1960s as a result of the apotheosis of Wittgenstein and the insidious effect of the linguistic turn centred on Oxford. That we are now living in the 'golden age of Metaphysics', as Peter Simons has put it, is in no small part due to Armstrong's lucid and sustained arguments for at the time unfashionable metaphysics, first for physicalism (Armstrong 1968), next for universals (Armstrong 1978), then for the non-Humean account of laws of nature as relations between universals (1983), and most recently for states of affairs as truthmakers (Armstrong 1997, 2004). While he may not have been the first to treat them in recent times, Armstrong has brought these topics to the respectful attention of the philosophical mainstream. Armstrong is a systematic metaphysician whose work is based on three basic theses. The first is respect for common sense, 'the Moorean facts' as he calls them. These are beliefs that are so securely grounded in human experience that any philosophical objection serves only to undermine the philosophy in question. This is in tension with his scientific naturalism, the thesis that completed science would be a complete account of everything. The third principle is actualism, the rejection of anything that is merely possible or merely dispositional, including uninstantiated universals. The second and third theses may themselves be based on the idea on which all metaphysics rests, namely that there is a systematic unified account of everything, with a presumption in favour of 'one way of being', as Anderson put it.