A. N. Prior Quotes on Time
A. N. Prior (1914–1969), the New Zealand philosopher whose Time and Modality (1957) and Past, Present and Future (1967) founded the modern formal study of tense logic, defended the case that the ordinary tensed structure of natural-language temporal discourse — past, present, future, with the corresponding operators and their logical interactions — is metaphysically prior to the tenseless B-series of dates and instants the post-Russell tradition had taken to be philosophically more fundamental. The framework grounds Prior's presentism — the doctrine that only the present is real, with past and future things existing only in the qualified sense supplied by the tense operators — and the corresponding philosophical defense of an A-theoretic metaphysics of time.
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.”