In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

A transcript of three lectures, given at Princeton University in 1970, which deals with (inter alia) debates concerning proper names in the philosophy of language.

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

Any property has two sorts of causal features: “forward-looking” ones, having to do with what its instantiation can contribute to causing, and ldquo;backward-looking” ones, having to do with how its instantiation can be caused. Such features of a property are essential to it, and properties sharing all of their causal features are identical. Causal necessity is thus a special case of metaphysical necessity. Appeals to imaginability have no more force against this view than they do against the Kripkean view that (...) statements like “Gold is an element” are metaphysically necessary. (shrink)

Any property has two sorts of causal features: “forward‐looking” ones, having to do with what its instantiation can contribute to causing, and ldquo;backward‐looking” ones, having to do with how its instantiation can be caused. Such features of a property are essential to it, and properties sharing all of their causal features are identical. Causal necessity is thus a special case of metaphysical necessity. Appeals to imaginability have no more force against this view than they do against the Kripkean view that (...) statements like “Gold is an element” are metaphysically necessary. (shrink)

To be a realist about modality, need one claim that more exists than just the various objects and properties that populate the world—e.g. worlds other than the actual one, or maximal consistent sets of propositions? Or does the existence of objects and properties by itself involve the obtaining of necessities (and possibilities) in re? The latter position is now unpopular but not unfamiliar. Aristotle held that objects have essences, and hence necessarily have certain properties. Recently it has been argued that (...) the identity of any property is tied to the natural laws in which it figures, which entails that the occurrence of properties involves the obtaining of nomological necessities ([24], pp. 206-33 and 234-60; [23]; cf. [25] and [6]). Somewhat less recently, Wittgenstein ([28], p. 168) worried that the reality of at least some properties—precise shades of colors being a prime example—involved the obtaining in re of certain impossibilities. This paper argues that Wittgenstein’s worries were right, and not just concerning some properties, but all properties whatever. That there are objects and properties in the world at all, then, amounts to there obtaining modal states of affairs. This argument supplements, rather than replaces, the others. The position on property incompatibility advanced here actually helps defend Aristotelian essentialism against epistemological objections, or so I have argued ([15]). And while this paper’s position on property incompatibility diverges from the idea that a property’s nomic profile is essential to it—more on this in the next section—it is at least compatible with the thought that the necessity involved in the laws of nature enters into ontology at the ground level. (shrink)

David Armstrong's book is a contribution to the philosophical discussion about possible worlds. Taking Wittgenstein's Tractatus as his point of departure, Professor Armstrong argues that nonactual possibilities and possible worlds are recombinations of actually existing elements, and as such are useful fictions. There is an extended criticism of the alternative-possible-worlds approach championed by the American philosopher David Lewis. This major work will be read with interest by a wide range of philosophers.

This article discusses how the words 'necessary' and 'analytic' are suitably used in philosophy. It is argued that analytic statements should not be called 'necessary'.