David Armstrong

Emeritus Professor John Bigelow delivered this eulogy at the memorial service for David Armstrong in the Great Hall of the University of Sydney on July 16.

Welcome to this gathering of commemoration for David Armstrong.

I am John Bigelow, and I have worked as an academic philosopher in New Zealand and Australia in the area known as “metaphysics”. Throughout my career David Armstrong was a towering presence and inspiration, both to me and to many of the undergraduate and postgraduate students I taught and supervised.

A friend of mine at La Trobe University, John Fox, once said that having disciples is a personality disorder. David Armstrong did not have that disorder. There have not been many “Armstrongians”, in quite the same way that there have been, say, “Platonists” or “Hegelians” or “Popperians”. In this respect Armstrong was more like Bertrand Russell than Ludwig Wittgenstein. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And students who have worked on Armstrong over the decades have not imitated him by trying laboriously to work out what on earth he meant by his various mysterious utterances, and then slavishly agreeing with him. Rather, they have imitated him by forthrightly disagreeing with him—in the same way that he himself had taken issue with his own teacher, John Anderson, on some but not all of the positions that Anderson had defended.

Armstrong’s influence has been enormous, and I will try to explain why. I see my role, in this memorial gathering, as speaking primarily to Armstrong’s legacy in academic philosophy. But I will begin with a personal anecdote that was told to me by David Armstrong’s great friends Steffi Lewis and David Lewis.

The story takes place at the annual philosophy conference one July some years ago—I think it might have been in Brisbane but it doesn’t matter exactly when or where. The conference always overlapped David Armstrong’s birthday, and he never got to celebrate his birthday in a normal manner because he was always at the annual conference attending other people’s papers, giving a paper, arguing with people over coffee breaks or at restaurants in the evening, or whatever. At the conference in question, Steffi and David and David had gone off to a restaurant for the lunch break, and after the lunch break there was to be the Annual General Meeting of the Australasian Association of Philosophy.

David and Steffi Lewis anticipated that at the AGM, after lunch, someone would move a motion with a political edge that would outrage David Armstrong. Armstrong was a very passionate man, and a very passionate political conservative. He disagreed heatedly with most of his fellow AAP members about a number of political issues of the day. And David Armstrong had a way of always saying exactly what he thought, whatever the consequences.

On this occasion, however, Steffi and David Lewis thought, like good philosophical consequentialists, that the best thing to do is whatever is likely to have the best consequences overall. They anticipated that if David went to the AGM there would be an emotional exchange and almost certainly the meeting would not be swayed in the direction David wanted, but would almost certainly, if anything, be polarised even more strongly to the other extreme. In addition, David would be worked up about the issues and the insults on both sides and this would distract him from philosophy for hours, perhaps days. And that would be a tragedy for the discipline of philosophy.

So over lunch they strategically introduced him to an intellectual puzzle that he had not yet heard about, called Newcomb’s problem. This problem had appeared in the Scientific American, and the top intellectuals in both philosophy and the sciences had been arguing about it, two entrenched camps had emerged, and there was no sign of any convergence towards any agreed solution to the problem. In outline, you are to imagine being given a choice between taking the contents of both boxes that are set in front of you, or of taking the contents of just one of those boxes. The twist is that you are given the information about the choices that other people have made in exactly this situation, and the consequences of the choices they made. Some people think that in this situation the rational thing to do is to take both boxes. That is what David Lewis thought: he was a two-boxer. But some people think that the rational thing to do is to take just one box. They are the one-boxers. And they included philosophers and scientists of the highest order in Australia and throughout the world.

Now the one thing that could distract David Armstrong from a potential political debacle was an intellectual challenge of this kind, which seemed to be baffling the best minds of his generation. David Lewis said that Armstrong was unusual in his response to the problem, because he started out with one answer and then switched to the other. I am not sure if he started out as a one-boxer and then switched to being a two-boxer, or vice versa. But Lewis said that in his experience people who start out as one-boxers lock into that view and never shift, and likewise for two-boxers. David Armstrong swapped sides.

And in his political life, I believe, David Armstrong swapped sides, and went from the left-wing to the right-wing. I remember his colleague David Stove saying that people accused him of having shifted to the right during the course of his life, but he maintained that he had always stayed in the same place and everyone else had shifted to the left around him—borrowing a term from astronomy he called this the phenomenon of “universal red shift”. But I believe Armstrong acknowledged that he had shifted from the left to the right. And at the restaurant with Steffi and David Lewis here he was again, apparently changing his stripes, and swapping from being a one-boxer to being a two-boxer, or vice versa.

This puzzle so distracted him that he did not notice the time and missed the AGM completely. I remember David and Steffi being very pleased with themselves for doing a service both to their friend David and to the discipline of philosophy—and to have done no harm at all to the political objectives that David cared about so deeply, since in their judgment David’s advocacy of those objectives at this particular meeting would almost certainly have been counterproductive.

I like this story because it highlights several dimensions of David Armstrong’s character. He was an extremely passionate man. And he was an intellectual, and was gripped by the hardest intellectual issues that were facing the human race during his lifetime, including both political issues and intellectual puzzles like Newcomb’s problem. And he inspired lasting and deep friendship from those he was close to, like Steffi and David Lewis.

I will enlarge a little on David Armstrong’s intellectual relationship with David Lewis, especially in metaphysics. David Lewis was a leading American and an Australasian philosopher: every year he would teach at Princeton and then he would fly to Australia and New Zealand, during the northern summer, to spend the southern winter down-under—like a migratory bird who had confused summer with winter. They not only talked philosophy in restaurants; there is also an astoundingly large philosophical correspondence between them.

David Lewis and David Armstrong agreed on the importance of metaphysics, and they agreed on a few of the central issues in metaphysics. But David Lewis was famous for a theory about possible worlds and he loved the abstract ontology of pure mathematics; whereas David Armstrong would never endorse a skerrick of either of those. And David Armstrong advanced a theory on what is known as the problem of universals, and a metaphysical doctrine he called the “truthmaker principle”, whereas David Lewis was deeply nominalist in his leanings and did not endorse either Armstrong’s universals or his truthmaker principle. There is a saying that you need the right amount of friction if you are going to move forward. David Lewis and David Armstrong provided each other with the right amount of friction. In fact, Armstrong changed the direction of Lewis’s metaphysics more than Lewis ever changed the direction of Armstrong’s metaphysics. And that, I urge, is an index of the nature of David Armstrong’s philosophical legacy.

Let me place David Armstrong’s contribution to metaphysics in a wider historical context, looking back over about three centuries. Metaphysics deals with such questions as whether there are any supernatural agents, like angels and demons and human souls that have left the human body after the body died; and about whether there is some kind of Intelligent Designer who created the material world of space and time. As a social conservative, David Armstrong had the greatest respect for the church and thought it enshrined deep truths. In particular, he thought it enshrined deep political truths concerning the importance of conservatism. But in his metaphysics, Armstrong was what is called a “naturalist”, meaning that he thought that there is nothing outside space and time. And he was a “materialist”, meaning that he thought that within space and time there are no immaterial ghosts or souls. In the fogs and draughty houses of Old England it is easy to believe in ghosts; but on the beach at Bondi it is obvious that everything is purely physical.

I once heard a false and very misleading legend about David Armstrong. He allegedly reached a point in a lecture where he needed to talk about some obvious truth, it did not matter which one. The usual practice was to talk about the obvious truth that snow is white, or that grass is green, but just for a change, the story goes, he said we might take the obvious truth that there is no God. A student newly arrived from England said, please sir, I’m not sure that is an obvious truth, and David is supposed to have replied, “Really? Well it is in Australia!” David was shocked when he heard this story, because he would never say anything like that. He had far too deep a respect for religion. But although the story gives exactly the wrong idea about David Armstrong, it does highlight the potential for painful conflicts to emerge between theories in academic metaphysics and the doctrines of traditional religions. Although Armstrong was socially conservative and hence supportive of the churches as institutions, his doctrines were inconsistent with many church doctrines (taken literally), and his students and colleagues were not slow to see this, as is evident from this way this false legend took root among Armstrong’s students and colleagues.

In my opinion, academic disciplines in the universities have bent over backwards, over the centuries, to avoid stepping on the toes of any of the dominant religions, and to keep the universities as purely “secular” institutions. But the doctrines of virtually all of the major religions are inextricably bound up with the central questions of metaphysics. So if metaphysics is to be included as an academic discipline, it is hard to see how the academy can be kept out of conflict with religions.

Partly for this reason, I suggest, we have had several centuries during which most of the leading philosophers at the universities have preached the doctrine of the death of metaphysics. They have argued that metaphysics—as an academic discipline—is impossible. The idea is that in metaphysics, as a discipline, we are supposed to ask questions about God, freedom and immortality and then try to answer these questions using rational argumentation of broadly the same kind that we find either in the empirical sciences or else in pure mathematics. But these questions, we are told, cannot be decided by rational arguments of either kind. Trying to argue rationally about these issues is a waste of time, because equally good arguments can be mounted on either side. Hence these metaphysical issues should be banished from the curriculum in all universities, leaving people to make up their minds on all metaphysical issues entirely by a leap of faith—or to reject the very metaphysical questions themselves as sheer nonsense.

Through these last two or three dark centuries of evangelical anti-metaphysicalisms of one kind and another, there have been a few staunch defenders of metaphysics as a rational pursuit of answers to deep metaphysical questions. One of these defenders was an Australian called Samuel Alexander, who defended the doctrine of “naturalism”, that there is nothing outside space and time. He went to England and inspired a young man called John Anderson, who came to Sydney and taught metaphysics here at Sydney University. And David Armstrong took up the torch of metaphysics from Anderson.

Worldwide, there has been a rebirth of metaphysics after centuries during which many philosophers were telling us that it was dead and buried and that the only job for philosophers to do, if they were ever to address topics in metaphysics, was to keep heaping dirt on its grave to make sure it would never rise again. And Australia has been punching far, far above its weight in this resurgence of metaphysics. And this is largely because of the work of David Armstrong.

They say a prophet is not without honour save in his own country. I think people in Australia often do not see the wood for the trees; they do not see things in perspective, when they are standing right in front of them. And Australians are wary of tall poppies (except in sport). Consider for instance the case of a conference in France that became a book edited by Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, called La structure du monde, objets, proprieties, états de choses: Renouveau de la métaphysique dans l’école australienne de philosophie. Here in Australia we focus mainly on our disagreements, so we do not see anything here as an “Australian school of philosophy”. But there has been a “renewal” of metaphysics worldwide, and Australian philosophers have played a big role.

There are papers by both Australian and French philosophers in this collection; but the title of the collection, “The structure of the world, objects, properties, states of affairs”, directly alludes pre-eminently to the work of David Armstrong. But this collection was entirely in French, and was almost utterly ignored in Australia.

In some ways it might be endearing when, in a case like this, we find that Australians seem not to care what the rest of the world thinks of them (except in sport). And more generally, Australian non-philosophers seem not to know or care much about the achievements of Australian academic philosophers. This has the advantage that philosophers, being ignored by the wider public, can (as the saying goes) “follow the argument wherever it leads”—without having to worry about what the neighbours might say. Thus, in particular, if our metaphysical conclusions contradict religious beliefs, we Australian philosophers have not had to worry much about retaliation from outside the ivory towers. There is a risk that we will not give the achievements of our best philosophers the full recognition that they deserve. But there are two sides to the coin.

David Armstrong was a fairly typical Australian philosopher in a large number of ways. In metaphysics, he was certainly one who followed the argument wherever it seemed to be leading. As an early defender of the so-called identity theory of U.T. Place and J.J.C. Smart at Adelaide, he was not deterred if this theory was dismissed in Oxford and Cambridge as “the Australian fallacy”. He did not care if the English scorned: he could see that the arguments were good ones, and he was right.

Likewise when he began defending a metaphysical theory of universals, David Armstrong did not care if the leading “nominalistic” philosophers at Harvard scorned this whole direction of research as a benighted return to the “scholasticism” of the Dark Ages. He did not care if they scorned in Harvard Yard: he could see that the arguments were good ones, and he was right. Again, David Armstrong did not care what others thought when he was confident that his arguments were on the right track. Or rather, he did care (he was a passionate man); but he did not let that tempt him to change what he was saying—or even to tone down the way that he was saying it. David Lewis, a graduate of Harvard, resisted his conclusions, but could see that his arguments were powerful and needed to be addressed.

Here is another story about David Armstrong from the very early years, before I knew him. It is a story which may not be entirely true but I will tell it anyway. There was a time when Armstrong followed an exercise program called “5BX”, developed for the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1961. One of my friends at Monash, Edward Khamara, assured me that Armstrong enthusiastically recommended this exercise program to everyone he spoke to. He could be very evangelical when he thought he had found a really good thing—like the mind-brain identity theory, or a posteriori realism about universals, or the 5BX exercise program. Once there was an extremely bohemian party at his house that went well into the night; and about 4 a.m. people fell asleep all over the house and grounds. At 6 a.m. one of these party-goers woke up to a silent house, with people asleep everywhere—and there was David Armstrong, doing his 5BX exercises, stark naked I was told. It may not be true but it should be, it was so true to his character. He did not care what others would think, if he knew he was right.

David Armstrong will be sorely missed, but his influence lives on. And it lives on not only in what we talk about in metaphysics, as it fights back against the protracted attempts for several centuries to bury it as an academic discipline, but also in one of the available ways in which metaphysicians can now talk about it. With full-frontal directness, no pussy-footing around. Looking for reasons, meeting objections, respecting logic—but always with passion. Even when you disagreed with him, he always made it clear why it mattered. Vale David Armstrong.