David Malet Armstrong

David Malet Armstrong
David M. Armstrong receiving his doctor of letters (h.c.) at Nottingham University, UK on 13 December 2007
Born	(1926-07-08)8 July 1926 Melbourne, Australia
Died	13 May 2014(2014-05-13) (aged 87) Sydney, Australia
Alma mater	University of Sydney
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Australian Realism, Analytic philosophy
Main interests	metaphysics, philosophy of mind
Influences John Anderson

David Malet Armstrong (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. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.

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".

After studying at the University of Sydney, Armstrong did a B.Phil at the University of Oxford and a Ph.D at the University of Melbourne. He taught at Birkbeck College in 1954–55, then at the University of Melbourne from 1956–63. In 1964, he became Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where he stayed until his retirement in 1992. During his career, he was a visiting lecturer at a number of institutions including Yale, Stanford, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Texas at Austin and Franklin and Marshall College.