A. N. Prior 1914 – 1969
Arthur Norman Prior was a New Zealand-born logician and the founder of modern tense logic. After early work in theology and ethics, he turned to logic and, in a series of articles and books in the 1950s and 1960s, developed a formal logic of past, present, and future tenses that has shaped the logical study of time, modality, and natural language ever since. Time and Modality and Past, Present and Future are his major works. He held chairs at Manchester and later at Balliol College, Oxford, and was an active Christian philosopher who took the metaphysical implications of tense logic seriously.
Key facts
- Nationality
- New Zealander
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“Tense logic is the logic of time.”
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“It is past, it is present, it is future: these are the central modes of time.”
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“Time is what real change requires.”
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“Logic must do justice to the asymmetry between past and future.”
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“What was and what will be are not on the same logical footing.”