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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.
The instantiation principle or principle of instantiation or principle of exemplification is the concept in metaphysics and logic (first put forward by David Malet Armstrong) that there can be no uninstantiated or unexemplified properties (or universals). In other words, it is impossible for a property to exist which is not had by some object.
State one, for example, is simply the state in which the machine, if it reads a B, writes a 1 and stays in that state, and in which, if it reads a 1, it moves one square to the right and goes into a different state. This is the functional definition of state one; it is its causal role in the overall system.
The book begins with Armstrong's early life experience as a nun in an authoritarian convent; she talks about the problems she encountered there, and recounts the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, and finally her leaving the convent.
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.
The question does not include the timing of when anything came to exist. Some have suggested the possibility of an infinite regress, where, if an entity cannot come from nothing and this concept is mutually exclusive from something, there must have always been something that caused the previous effect, with this causal chain (either deterministic or probabilistic) extending infinitely back in ...
Five games up on Tennessee in the standings and an eight-point favorite to start the game, Houston ought to have had a fairly easy time dispatching the frenetic, erratic Titans.
Metaphysics is the study of the most general features of reality, including existence, objects and their properties, possibility and necessity, space and time, change, causation, and the relation between matter and mind.