Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Armstrong, D. M.

  • A Sketch of Armstrong’s Naturalism

    And some reasons to question it.  Top of the (Sub)stack. ……………………… Expositing Armstrong, I wrote   The exclusion of so-called abstract entities or abstract objects such as mathematical sets, unexemplified universals, and numbers from the roster of the real is because of their lack  of causal power.  What causal role could they play?    And…

  • Truthmaker Maximalism Questioned

     0) What David Armstrong calls truthmaker maximalism is the thesis that every truth has a truthmaker.  Although I find the basic truthmaker intuition well-nigh irresistible, I have difficulty with the notion that every truth has a truthmaker.  Thus I question truthmaker maximalism (TM). Alan Rhoda has recently come out in favor of TM in a…

  • Penultimate Draft: Meinertsen Review for Metaphysica

    REVIEW ARTICLE Bo R. Meinertsen, Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley's Regress, Springer 2018, 174 + xviii pp. Summary Professor Meinertsen's detailed treatment of states of affairs agrees with the spirit and much of the letter of David M. Armstrong's middle period as represented in his A World of…

  • David Stove Pays Tribute to David Armstrong and Comments on the Malignancy of the Left

    Excerpt: But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in…

  • Working Draft: The Case Against Facts

    Comments appreciated if you are en rapport with the subject matter.   The Case Against Facts   Arianna Betti, Against Facts, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 296 + xxvii   If Buridan's contribution to the bestiarum philosophorum was the ass, and David Armstrong's the ostrich, Arianna Betti's is the hedgehog bristling with spines. The hedgehog…