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David Malet Armstrong AO FAHA (8 July 1926 – 13 May 2014), [4] 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.
Armstrong looks at Gilbert Ryle's refinement of Behaviourism, Dispositional Behaviourism. Armstrong illustrates Ryle's idea with a description of glass - brittleness is the disposition of materials such as glass to shatter under certain circumstances. Whether or not the glass shatters in a particular instance, it has the disposition to do so.
This is a list of metaphysicians, philosophers who specialize in metaphysics. See also Lists of philosophers . This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.
In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is the thesis that each and every mental state (for example, the state of having a belief, of having a desire, or of being in pain) is constituted solely by its functional role, which means its causal relation to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. [1]
Metaphysics is related to many fields of inquiry by investigating their basic concepts and relation to the fundamental structure of reality. For example, the natural sciences rely on concepts such as law of nature, causation, necessity, and spacetime to formulate their theories and predict or explain the outcomes of experiments. [128]
This question has been written about by philosophers since at least the ancient Parmenides (c. 515 BC). [1] [2]"Why is there anything at all?" or "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question about the reason for basic existence which has been raised or commented on by a range of philosophers and physicists, including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, [3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, [4] and ...
Peirce divided metaphysics into (1) ontology or general metaphysics, (2) psychical or religious metaphysics, and (3) physical metaphysics. Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) – French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson considered change to be the fundamental nature of reality.
For Williams, time and space fall under the study of cosmology. Speculative cosmology is the other branch of metaphysics, along with analytic ontology. [9] As D.M. Armstrong notes, this distinction between analytic ontology and speculative cosmology is a division within metaphysics. [14] As such, ontology does not exhaust metaphysics.