David Armstrong, the doyen of Australian philosophers, and the most influential to date on the international stage, has died in Sydney at the age of 87. He leaves a philosophical legacy of 16 books and innumerable articles, principally in epistemology and metaphysics, and several generations of students deeply influenced by his teaching. He also leaves us, laden with honours: AO, FAHA, Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary D.Litt. from the University of Nottingham, all of which attest to his standing among his contemporaries.
His was a family of some distinction–his father rose to the rank of Commodore in the Royal Australian Navy, his mother belonged to an academic family from Jersey. One grandfather became Director-General of Public Health in NSW, while the other became Rector of Exeter College, Oxford. David particularly valued the Jersey connection, and in retirement he and his wife Jenny (de Bohun) were much given to genealogy.
After a school career that included periods at the Dragon School in Oxford, and at Geelong Grammar, and after a short stint in the navy in the post-war occupation of Japan, he distinguished himself as a student of Philosophy in John Anderson's Department at the University of Sydney.
After Sydney University, David took his B.Phil. at the University of Oxford, held a temporary post at the University of London, and then in 1956 settled in Melbourne, where with great energy he set about building a reputation and a career at the University of Melbourne, in what was at that time the premier Philosophy department in Australia. His first book, Berkeley's Theory of Vision, appeared in 1960. The following year he picked up a Ph.D., almost in passing, for work that appeared as Perception and the Physical World. A third book, Bodily Sensations, followed closely behind.
In 1964 he was appointed to the Challis Chair at the University of Sydney, where, apart from a string of visiting appointments, he spent the remainder of his career, retiring in 1991, but continuing to be active as a Professor Emeritus for many years after that.
He held conservative political and social views that distinguished him from many of his academic colleagues–being, early and late, a supporter of the Quadrant element in Australia's political and cultural life–and, fairly near the start of his time at the University of Sydney, these came into play in conflicts over the content and methods for courses in philosophy. For a time, this resulted in some notoriety for David, as the controversies of the late 1960s and early 1970s took a dramatic form, producing the ‘Split’ and the two reciprocally antagonistic Sydney Philosophy Departments.
But even in the most fraught circumstances, David's constitutional cheerfulness and collegiality enabled him to establish and maintain a wide circle of warm local and international friends and co-workers. And as one who did not bear grudges, once political passions had subsided he became cordially reconciled to many of those who had been his opponents. Already those tumults seem long ago, and there is no doubt that what he will be remembered–and honoured–for will be his contributions to Philosophy.
It is not easy, after the passage of more than fifty years, to recapture the anti-metaphysical tone of British philosophy in the 1950s. There was a great deal of late-Wittgensteinian discussion of the nature and possibility of philosophy itself, with a widespread sense that philosophy would have to take a quite new direction. David had been inoculated against such an outlook by his training under Anderson, and by his own sanguine attachment to earlier, more confident, conceptions of the philosopher's task. It is not the least of his services to have demonstrated–ab esse ad posse–that systematic epistemology is a proper study, and that metaphysics consists in tackling genuine questions, not merely in unravelling tangles.
A naturalistic realism was, first and last, the leitmotif of his work. It is there in the perception book, and still more so in A Materialist Theory of the Mind (1968), with its immensely influential division of intellectual labour–philosophical analysis to identify the mind as that responsible for mental activities, and scientific enquiry to discover that the nervous system is indeed what does the work. This book consolidated the emerging family of identity and functionalist theories of mind which continue to dominate the field.
David then returned to epistemology, with his work on causal theories of perception, a reliabilist theory of knowledge, and map theories of belief, in Belief, Truth and Knowledge (1973)–before embarking on his largest and most original program, in ontology of a traditional stamp. Almost single-handedly, with Universals and Scientific Realism (1978), he revived Realism about Universals in the midst of the prevailing Nominalism. Then he developed an account of laws of nature (1983's What Is a Law of Nature?), followed by accounts of A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility (1989), A World of States of Affairs (1997), and Truth and Truthmakers (2004), before finishing in 2010 with his Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics.
In all these fields, his writing and his indefatigable presenting of papers, informal talking, and letter-writing made their mark, setting or modifying the terms of the debate. The impact of all this has been two generations of philosophers, following his lead as much as that of any other single figure, engaged in the revival of metaphysical philosophy. A matchless legacy.