David Armstrong

David Malet Armstrong AO, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney since 1992 and Challis Professor of Philosophy from 1964 to 1991, died peacefully on May 13. He was born in Melbourne in 1926 and is survived by his wife Jenny Armstrong, and by his former wife Madeleine Haydon. David was a member of the board of directors of Quadrant from 1975 to 2014.

I first met David Armstrong early in 1947 when, recently discharged from the Navy, he arrived at Sydney University and enrolled in Philosophy 1. It was obvious immediately that he was a special case. The rest of us—the philosophy students—were dutifully taking down notes at lectures and trying to think like philosophers. But David was the real thing. He was already a philosopher. In the last lecture he ever gave—at Sydney University a couple of years ago—his opening words were: “What is truth?” It was the same question that fascinated him, obsessed him, sixty-five years earlier and stood him apart. Of course he joined in the usual student activities—political clubs, lunch-time meetings, the student newspaper. But philosophy was the thing. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on “A Realist Reconstruction of Kant’s Transcendental Analytic”.

There are several strands to the legend of David Armstrong. One is his intellectual achievement—his many books on epistemology and metaphysics. The most famous and the one that made his international reputation is A Materialist Theory of the Mind. I will not presume to judge his work in philosophy but it was these books that led the Canadian philosopher Andrew Irvine to say that Armstrong’s influence on world culture has been “enormous”.

Another strand was his special way of combining traditionalism with freedom of thought. It is well caught in an interview he had with the American philosopher Andrew Chrucky. “I think of myself,” he said, “as in the Christian and Jewish tradition and in the tradition of Greece.” He added characteristically: “I have the greatest respect for religion. It enshrines many truths. But I do not think it is actually true.”

But it is a third strand that I want to emphasise here. It is what the moralists, certainly the ancient moralists, call virtue. David was a virtuous man. Disinterestedness is part of it. He sometimes called it “mental health”. (He inscribed my copy of one of his books, “It’s for mental health.”) David Stove touched on it in the tribute he delivered at the time of David Armstrong’s retirement from the Challis Chair of Philosophy in 1991. Stove sometimes experienced, he said, that mood of self-disgust to which many of us are subject when we consider our moral failings and limited abilities. What rescued him from despair was the reflection that Armstrong had been his life-long friend. If Armstrong found some merit in him, there must be something to be said for him after all.

In the course of his life David Armstrong was often involved in public controversies—from the Vietnam War (which he supported) to the radicalisation of universities (which he opposed) to Quadrant (which he selflessly served for most of its life). There is no need to rehearse the details now. They are well summarised in Jim Franklin’s history of philosophy in Australia, Corrupting the Youth, especially the chapter on the Sydney University “disturbances” some forty years ago. But two themes are plain. One is Armstrong’s heart-and-soul determination to defend the lingering integrity of universities against the political ideologues who wanted to destroy the Philosophy Department and drive him out of Sydney University. The other theme is that so many of the philosophers who opposed him became in the end his friends and supporters. They recognised his virtue. Despite everything, David believed that most philosophers are good people. They may be silly or unpractical. But their follies do not spring from badness of heart. Certainly he brought this virtue to all his controversies, and it was this, I think, that won his opponents over.

He also brought this “mental health” to his own work and life. I recall the launching some ten years ago of the book Truth and Truthmakers. After the speeches, David was invited to respond. He spent his time correcting and regretting a logical error that he had found on such-and-such a page of his book after it had gone to press. I should add that we all pored over the offending page but none of us could find the error.

The matter came up again a couple of years ago when he gave that last public lecture mentioned earlier. It was at Sydney University in a meeting convened by the Russellian Society. Some hundred or so students, most of whom were not born when David retired in 1991, turned up to hear him. At question time, unaware that the issue had been the subject of debate in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, I asked him what indeed was that error to which he had drawn attention and which I could not find. He replied simply: “I don’t remember.” I took him to mean that it was so trivial a matter so long ago that he could not be expected to remember it. But I soon realised that it was more. What he was telling us, I believe, was that the dreadful complications of Parkinson’s had begun to kick in. A line sprang to mind: “Oh what noble mind is here o’erthrown!”

David once wrote: “If I have made some contribution to Australian philosophy, that would be a great satisfaction to me.” But he did more. He was a great Australian, but he was also a great philosopher and a great man.