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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 brings together two earlier conclusions: that the mind is "that which stands behind and brings about our complex behaviour"; [6] and that the Behaviourist's dispositions are "states that underlie behaviour and, under certain circumstances, bring about behaviour", [6] and reaches "a conception of a mental state as a state of the person ...
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.
Metaphysical nihilism is the philosophical theory that there might have been no objects at all—that is, that there is a possible world in which there are no objects at all; or at least that there might have been no concrete objects at all, so that even if every possible world contains some objects, there is at least one that contains only abstract objects.
Metaphysical necessity is contrasted with other types of necessity. For example, the philosophers of religion John Hick [2] and William L. Rowe [3] distinguished the following three: factual necessity (existential necessity): a factually necessary being is not causally dependent on any other being, while any other being is causally dependent on it.
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.
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. [131]
In the first mode, events are ordered as future, present, and past.Futurity and pastness allow of degrees, while the present does not. When we speak of time in this way, we are speaking in terms of a series of positions which run from the remote past through the recent past to the present, and from the present through the near future all the way to the remote future.