David Malet Armstrong was born in Melbourne, Australia. He received his first degree at the University of Sydney where John Anderson held the Challis chair of philosophy. He then completed the bachelor of philosophy at Oxford (in 1954), being one of the first of the many Australian philosophers in the 1950s and 1960s to take that degree. After a short spell at Birkbeck College, London, he accepted a position at the University of Melbourne. In 1964 he took up the Challis chair in Sydney where he stayed until his retirement in 1991.

Armstrong has made influential contributions to a remarkable range of major topics in epistemology and metaphysics, including perception, materialism, bodily sensations, belief and knowledge, laws, universals, and the metaphysics of possibility. Recurrent themes have been the need to reconcile what the philosopher says with the teachings of science, a preference for realist over...