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Truthmakers have come to play a central role in David Armstrong's metaphysics. They are the things that stand in the relation of truthmaking to truthbearers. This chapter focuses on the relation. More specifically, it discusses a thesis Armstrong holds about truthmaking that is of special importance to him; namely, the thesis that truthmaking is an internal relation. It explores what work this thesis is supposed to do for Armstrong, especially for this doctrine of the ontological free lunch, raising questions and pointing out difficulties along the way. At the end of the chapter, it is shown that Armstrong's preferred truthbearers generate a serious difficulty for his thesis that the truthmaking relation is internal.

Chapter 4 defends the idea that particulars can be relational against what has been called the “standard view”. It begins with a brief description of an earlier version of a relational ontology in Hegel and British Hegelianism. Early 20^th century philosophers, Bertrand Russell above all, rejected the idealism of British Hegelianism, and rested an alternative on a rejection of Hegelianism's relationality. Thus was born the “standard view” that particulars must be non-relational. The chapter explores the arguments of Russell, and more recently David Armstrong, and argues that their conclusions are not necessary, and thus there is no good reason to reject the possibility that particulars, and therefore nature generally, may be relational. Whether we ought to regard particulars as relational depends on the adequacy and plausibility of the ontology as it is developed, and on the conceptual work it can do.

During 1887 both Flagler and Franklin Smith hurried to complete their hotels. In 1887, a great fire destroyed part of the city, including the Catholic cathedral. Flagler helped finance its reconstruction. James Renwick designed a bell tower to go with the rebuilt church. Bishop John Moore gave Flagler a piece of church land to compensate him for his financial help. Flagler and others attempted to save as much of “old” St. Augustine as possible, their efforts much resembling modern preservation movements. Terra cotta ornamentation went into the Ponce de Leon. Pottier and Stymus furnished the woodwork for the interior. The architect Bernard Maybeck joined the Carrère and Hastings firm while the hotel was being built. Louis C. Tiffany provided stained glass for the building. David Maitland Armstrong may have played a role in creation of the windows. George W. Maynard and Herman Schladermundt painted the murals on the ceilings of the hotel. The landscaping of the grounds was done in cooperation with Nathan Frank Barrett.

According to Swinburne’s Bayesian argument from temporal order, the fact that our universe is ordered by relatively simple laws of nature is more probable if God exists than if he does not. If God does not exist, a completely chaotic universe allegedly is a priori more probable than a universe ordered by simple laws. However, this design argument from temporal order cannot be considered in isolation from the cosmological argument. With regard to each of three possible cosmological scenarios it can be shown that the argument from temporal order is unconvincing. Concerning design arguments from spatial order, Swinburne acknowledges that arguments on the basis of the functionality of organisms should be abandoned. Instead, he focuses on fine-tuning arguments. But neither the fine-tuning argument from logically possible universes nor the fine-tuning argument from complexity are convincing C-inductive arguments, which avoid the risk of God-of-the-gaps, even if they are supported by the argument from beauty.

This chapter shows that in advancing physicalist views of mind, Jack Smart, David Lewis, and David Armstrong were working within a tradition. It then asks, “What is the rationale for this tradition?” The answer to this question is divided into five parts: one part is a thesis about properties and similarity, one part is a thesis about similarity and logical space, one part is a thesis about certain claims in fundamental metaphysics, one part is a thesis about similarities between aggregations, and one part is a certain optimism about our ability to capture similarities and patterns in words. With that many considerations, there is ample scope for dissent somewhere along the way, but the aim here is to make the argument path as clear as possible so it will not overwhelm with the detail of various considerations along the way.