David Malet Armstrong

David Malet Armstrong (born 8 July 1926), often D. M. Armstrong, is 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. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.

Famous quotes containing the words malet armstrong, david, malet and/or armstrong:

    The concept of a mental state is primarily the concept of a state of the person apt for bringing about a certain sort of behaviour.
    —David Malet Armstrong (b. 1926)

    What though the traveler tell us of the ruins of Egypt, are we so sick or idle that we must sacrifice our America and today to some man’s ill-remembered and indolent story? Carnac and Luxor are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert sand and at length a wave of the Mediterranean Sea are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur. Carnac! Carnac! here is Carnac for me. I behold the columns of a larger
    and purer temple.
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The concept of a mental state is primarily the concept of a state of the person apt for bringing about a certain sort of behaviour.
    —David Malet Armstrong (b. 1926)

    I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.
    Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)