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David Armstrong was born in Melbourne on 8 July 1926. He attended the Dragon School in Oxford in the UK and then the Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, Australia, before serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1945-46) and taking his first degree at the University of Sydney (1947-50). Although he would later spend the bulk of his career at Sydney, he went to the University of Oxford for his BPhil (1952-54) and secured his first teaching job as assistant lecturer at what was then Birkbeck College, University of London (1954-55).

In 1956, however, Professor Armstrong returned to Australia as lecturer and then senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne (1956-63), where he was also awarded a PhD. From there he moved back to Sydney as Challis professor of philosophy (1964-91), becoming emeritus upon retirement. A conservative by temperament, he became embroiled in a fierce dispute that eventually saw a split between a department for traditional and modern philosophy and a more radical department for general philosophy.

When he started studying the subject, Professor Armstrong once told an interviewer, philosophy in the English-speaking world ¡°had taken a very strange turn, one might say an unphilosophical turn. It had turned to small matters. In particular, it had turned towards language. You didn¡¯t talk about Xs, you talked about talk about Xs.¡± Yet soon the influence of the philosopher John Anderson encouraged him to turn to bigger themes and to adopt as his ¡°unofficial slogan¡­¡®Put semantics last¡¯. Do not look at what we say about things, but look at the things themselves.¡±

This soon led Professor Armstrong to ¡°issues [that] seem to be among the most important theoretical and practical questions that one can raise: ¡®Is the mind purely physical?¡¯, ¡®Are values objective or subjective?¡¯ and so on. Some of us are drawn, perhaps like moths to a flame, to discuss such matters in an argumentative fashion. It is one of the ¡®great games¡¯ of the human mind.¡±

In attempting to answer such questions, Professor Armstrong developed a fully fledged system of metaphysics that made him the key figure in an informal group known as the ¡°Australian materialists¡±. His major works include A Materialist Theory of Mind (1968), the two-volume Universals and Scientific Realism (1978) and What is a Law of Nature? (1983).

Professor Armstrong died after a long illness on 13 May and is survived by his second wife, Jennifer Mary de Bohun Clark, and his stepchildren.

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com