I first met David Armstrong early in 1947 when, recently discharged from the Navy, he arrived at Sydney University and enrolled in Philosophy 1. It was obvious immediately that he was a special case. The rest of us — the philosophy students — were dutifully taking down notes at lectures and trying to think like philosophers. But David was the real thing. He was already a philosopher. In the last public lecture he ever gave — at Sydney University a couple of years ago — his opening words were: ‘What is truth?’ It was the same question that fascinated and obsessed him 65 years earlier and stood him apart. Of course, he participated in the usual student activities, joining political clubs, attending lunch-time meetings, writing for the student newspaper. But philosophy was the thing. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on ‘A Realist Reconstruction of Kant’s Transcendental Analytic.’
There are several strands to the legend of David Armstrong. One is his intellectual achievement — his many books on epistemology and metaphysics. The most famous and the one that made his international reputation is A Materialist Theory of the Mind. I do not presume to assess his work in philosophy but it was these books that led the Canadian philosopher Andrew Irvine to say that Armstrong’s influence on world culture has been ‘enormous’.Another strand was his way of combining traditionalism with freedom of thought. It is well caught in an interview he had with the American philosopher Andrew Chrucky. ‘I think of myself,’ he said, ‘as in the Christian and Jewish tradition and in the tradition of Greece.’ He added characteristically: ‘I have the greatest respect for religion. It enshrines many truths. But I do not think it is actually true.’
But it is a third strand that I want to emphasise today. David Stove touched on it in the tribute he delivered at the time of Armstrong’s retirement from the Challis Chair of Philosophy in 1991. Stove sometimes experienced, he said, that mood of self-disgust to which many of us are subject when we consider our moral failings and limited abilities. But what rescued Stove from despair was the reflection that Armstrong had been his life-long friend. If Armstrong found some merit in him, there must be something to be said for him after all.
What is this quality that so many like Stove found in David Armstrong? I think it is what the moralists, certainly the ancient moralists, call virtue. Disinterestedness is part of it. David sometimes called it ‘mental health’. (He inscribed my copy of his book Truth and Truthmakers: ‘It’s for mental health.’) In the course of his life David was often involved in public controversies — from the Vietnam war (which he supported) to the radicalisation of universities (which he opposed) to Quadrant magazine (which he served so selflessly for most of its life). But two themes are plain. One is Armstrong’s heart-and-soul determination to defend the integrity of universities against the political ideologues who wanted to destroy the Philosophy department and drive him out of Sydney University. (It’s worth recalling that the President of the SRC, a certain Tony Abbott, called on him at that time to offer support. Nothing much came of the meeting in the Philosophy Room, but we can be sure that David Armstrong did not forget it.)
The other theme is that so many of his opponents became in the end his friends and supporters. They recognised his virtue, his disinterestedness. Most philosophers, he said, are good people. They may be silly or unpractical. But their follies do not spring from badness of heart. He brought this disinterestedness to the Sydney University wars and it won his opponents over.
He also brought ‘mental health’ to his own work. I recall the launching some ten years ago in the Co-op book-shop of his book Truth and Truthmakers. After the speeches David was invited to respond. He spent his time correcting and regretting a logical error that he had found on such-and-such a page of the book after it had gone to press. I should add that the rest of us pored over the offending page but none of us could find the error.
The issue came up again a couple of years ago when he gave his last public lecture, mentioned above. It was at Sydney University in a meeting convened by the Russellian Society. Some hundred or so students, most of whom were not born when David retired in 1991, turned up to hear the grand old man. I was there for old times’ sake. At question time, unaware that the matter had been the subject of debate in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, I asked him what was that error to which he had drawn attention and which I could not find. He replied simply: ‘I don’t remember.’ At the time I took him to mean that it was so trivial an error made so long ago that he could not be expected to remember it. I soon realised that it was more. What he was telling us, I believe, was that the dreadful complications of Parkinson’s had begun to kick in. A line sprang to mind: ‘Oh what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’
David once wrote: ‘If I have made some contribution to Australian philosophy, that would be a great satisfaction to me.’ But he did more. He was a great Australian, but he was also a great philosopher and a great man.
