A. N. Prior Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to A. N. Prior, organized by topic.
A. N. Prior on Time
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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.”