Biography:Arthur Prior

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Short description: Logician and philosopher (1914–1969)


Arthur Norman Prior
Arthur Prior in Wakefield 1959
Prior in 1959
Born(1914-12-04)4 December 1914
Masterton, New Zealand
Died6 October 1969(1969-10-06) (aged 54)
Trondheim, Norway
EducationUniversity of Otago (B.A., 1935; M.A., 1937)[1]
Spouse(s)
  • Clare Hunter
  • Mary Wilkinson
SchoolAnalytic philosophy
InstitutionsCanterbury University College
Academic advisorsJ. N. Findlay[1]
Doctoral studentsMax Cresswell
Kit Fine
Other notable studentsGenevieve Lloyd[5]
Jonathan Bennett[5]
Richard Routley
Main interests
Notable ideas

Arthur Norman Prior (4 December 1914 – 6 October 1969), usually cited as A. N. Prior, was a New Zealand–born logician and philosopher. Prior (1957) founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contributions to intensional logic, particularly in Prior (1971).

Biography

Prior was born in Masterton, New Zealand, on 4 December 1914, the only child of Australian-born parents: Norman Henry Prior (1882–1967) and his wife born Elizabeth Munton Rothesay Teague (1889–1914). His mother died less than three weeks after his birth and he was cared for by his father's sister. His father, a medical practitioner in general practice, after war service at Gallipoli and in France—where he was awarded the Military Cross—remarried in 1920. There were three more children: Elaine, the epidemiologist Ian Prior, and Owen. Arthur Prior grew up in a prominent Methodist household. His two Wesleyan grandfathers, the Reverends Samuel Fowler Prior and Hugh Henwood Teague, were sent from England to South Australia as missionaries in 1875.[6] The Prior family first moved to New Zealand in 1893.

As the son of a doctor, Prior at first considered becoming a biologist, but ended up focusing on theology and philosophy, graduating from the University of Otago in 1935 with a B.A. in philosophy. While studying for his B.A., Prior attended the seminary at Dunedin's Knox Theological Hall but decided against entering the Presbyterian ministry. John Findlay, Professor of Philosophy at Otago, first opened up the study of logic for Prior.[7] In 1936, Prior married Clare Hunter, a freelance journalist, and they spent several years in Europe, during which they tried to earn a living as writers. Daunted by the prospect of an invasion of Britain, he and Clare returned to New Zealand in 1940.[1] At this point in his life he was a devout Presbyterian, though he became an atheist later in life.[8][9]

After divorce from his first wife, he remarried in 1943 to Mary Wilkinson, with whom he would have two children. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force from 1943 to 1945 before embarking on an academic career at Canterbury University College in February 1946. His first position was a lectureship which had become available when Karl Popper left the university.[10]

After returning to New Zealand following a year at Oxford as a visiting lecturer he took up a professorship in 1959 at Manchester University where he remained until he was elected a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford in 1966 and appointed a Reader. He continued his Manchester practice of accepting visiting professorships.[10]

Arthur Prior went to give lectures at Norwegian universities in September 1969 and on 6 October 1969, the night before he was to deliver a lecture there, he died from a heart attack at Trondheim, Norway.[10]

Professional life

Prior was educated entirely in New Zealand, where he was fortunate to have come under the influence of J. N. Findlay,[1] under whom he wrote his M.A. thesis on 'The Nature of Logic'.[11] While Prior was very fond of the theology of Karl Barth, his early criticism of Barth's adherence to Philosophical Idealism, is a mark of Findlay's influence on Prior.[11]

He began teaching philosophy and logic at Canterbury University College in February 1946, filling the vacancy created by Karl Popper's resignation. In 1951 Prior met J. J. C. Smart, also known as "Jack" Smart, at a philosophical conference in Australia and the two developed a life-long friendship. Their correspondence was influential on Prior's development of tense logic. Smart adhered to the tenseless theory of time and was never persuaded by Prior's arguments, though Prior was influential in making Smart skeptical about Wittgenstein's view on pseudo-relations.[12] He became Professor in 1953. Thanks to the good offices of Gilbert Ryle, who had met Prior in New Zealand in 1954, Prior spent the year 1956 on leave at the University of Oxford, where he gave the John Locke lectures in philosophy. These were subsequently published as Time and Modality (1957). This is a seminal contribution to the study of tense logic and the metaphysics of time, in which Prior championed the A-theorist view that the temporal modalities of past, present and future are basic ontological categories of fundamental importance for our understanding of time and the world. Prior was several times warned by J. J. C. Smart against making tense-logic the topic of his John Locke lectures. Smart feared that tense-logic would get Prior "involved in side issues, even straight philosophy, and not in the stuff that will do Oxford most good."[13] Prior was however convinced that tense-logic had the potential to benefit logic, as well as philosophy, and thus he considered his lectures an "expression of a conviction that formal logic and general philosophy have more to bring to one another than is sometimes supposed".[14]

During his time at Oxford, Prior met Peter Geach and William Kneale, influenced John Lemmon, and corresponded with the adolescent Saul Kripke. Logic in the United Kingdom was then in a rather low state, being "deeply out of fashion and its practitioners were isolated and somewhat demoralized."[15] Prior arranged Logical a Colloquium which brought together such Logicians as John Lemmon, Peter Geach, Czesław Lejewski and more.[16] The colloquiums were a great success and, together with Prior's John Locke lecture and his visits around the country, he helped revitalize British logic.[16] From 1959 to 1966, he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, having taught Osmund Lewry. From 1966 until his death he was Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford. His students include Max Cresswell, Kit Fine, and Robert Bull.

Almost entirely self-taught in modern formal logic, Prior published four major papers on logic in 1952,[17] when he was 38 years of age, shortly after discovering the work of Józef Maria Bocheński and Jan Łukasiewicz,[18] despite very little of Łukasiewicz's work being translated into English.[19][20] He went so far as to read untranslated Polish texts without being able to speak Polish claiming "the symbols are so illuminating that the fact that the text is incomprehensible doesn’t much matter".[19] He went on to employ Polish notation throughout his career.[21] Prior (1955) distills much of his early teaching of logic in New Zealand. Prior's work on tense logic provides a systematic and extended defense of a tensed conception of reality in which propositional statements can change truth value over time.[22]

Prior stood out by virtue of his strong interest in the history of logic. He was one of the first English-speaking logicians to appreciate the nature and scope of the logical work of Charles Sanders Peirce, and the distinction between de dicto and de re in modal logic. Prior taught and researched modal logic before Kripke proposed his possible worlds semantics for it, at a time when modality and intensionality commanded little interest in the English speaking world, and had even come under sharp attack by Willard Van Orman Quine.

He is now said to be the precursor of hybrid logic.[23] Undertaking (in one section of his book Past, Present, and Future (1967)) the attempt to combine binary (e.g., "until") and unary (e.g., "will always be") temporal operators to one system of temporal logic, Prior—as an incidental result—builds a base for later hybrid languages.

His work Time and Modality explored the use of a many-valued logic to explain the problem of non-referring names.

Prior's work was both philosophical and formal and provides a productive synergy between formal innovation and linguistic analysis.[citation needed] Natural language, he remarked, can embody folly and confusion as well as the wisdom of our ancestors. He was scrupulous in setting out the views of his adversaries, and provided many constructive suggestions about the formal development of alternative views.

Publications

The following books were either written by Prior, or are posthumous collections of journal articles and unpublished papers that he wrote:

  • 1949. Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Oxford University Press (ISBN:0-19-824157-7)
  • 1955, 1962. Formal Logic. Oxford University Press.
  • 1957. Time and Modality. Oxford University Press. Based on his 1956 John Locke lectures.
  • 1962. "Changes in Events and Changes in Things". University of Kansas.
  • 1967. Past, Present and Future. Oxford University Press.
  • 1968. Papers on Time and Tense. Oxford University Press.
  • 1971. Objects of Thought. Edited by P. T. Geach and A. J. P. Kenny. Oxford University Press.
  • 1976. The Doctrine of Propositions and Terms. Edited by P. T. Geach and A. J. P. Kenny. London: Duckworth.
  • 1976. Papers in Logic and Ethics. Edited by P. T. Geach and A. J. P. Kenny. London: Duckworth.
  • 1977. Worlds, Times and Selves. Edited by Kit Fine. London: Duckworth.
  • 2003. Papers on Time and Tense. Second expanded edition by Per Hasle, Peter Øhrstrøm, Torben Braüner & Jack Copeland. Oxford University Press.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Arthur Prior (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  2. ↑ Mary Prior and Arthur Prior, "Erotetic Logic", The Philosophical Review 64(1) (1955): pp. 43–59 doi:10.2307/2182232.
  3. ↑ Andrew Bacon, John Hawthorne & Gabriel Uzquiano, "Higher-order free logic and the Prior-Kaplan paradox", Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46(4–5): 493–541 (2016).
  4. ↑ McNamara, Paul. "Deontic Logic". in Zalta, Edward N.. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-deontic/. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Tree – David Chalmers" (in en-US). http://consc.net/tree/. 
  6. ↑ Adelaide Observer, 28 August 1875, p. 7.
  7. ↑ Copeland, B. Jack. "Arthur Prior". in Zalta, Edward N.. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prior/. 
  8. ↑ Copeland, B. Jack (2020), Zalta, Edward N., ed., Arthur Prior (Spring 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/prior/, retrieved 2021-03-10, "He was, at this stage of his life, obsessed with religion. He believed in the virgin birth and the voice of the devil, and was a devout Presbyterian (Prior 1940)...In later life, however, he described himself as having ‘no religious beliefs’ (Prior c.1967). In 1961, when Max Cresswell—then a logic student aged 21—met him for the first time, in Manchester, Prior announced: ‘Mr Cresswell, isn’t it a pity that God does not exist’." 
  9. ↑ Cohen, L.J. (2006). Encyclopedia of philosophy. Donald M. Borchert (2nd ed.). Detroit: Thomson Gale/Macmillan Reference USA. ISBN 0-02-865780-2. OCLC 61151356. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/61151356. "He was influenced for several years by the theologian Arthur Miller, who combined a strict adherence to Presbyterian doctrine with an equally strong support for socialism and opposition to nationalism. But Prior's pacifism weakened, and he served from 1942 to 1945 in the New Zealand air force. And the central focus of his interests gradually shifted - helped by an occasional bout of atheism - from theology to ethics and logic." 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Per Hasle The Life of Prior (1914-69). A Brief Overview, accessed 8 June 2019
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 David Jakobsen (2019): A.N. Prior and ‘The Nature of Logic’, History and Philosophy of Logic, DOI: 10.1080/01445340.2019.1605479
  12. ↑ Jakobsen, D. (2017) The Significance of the Prior-Smart Correspondence for the Rise of Tense-Logic. In: Hasle, P., Blackburn, P. and Øhrstrøm, P.(eds.): Logic and Philosophy of Time: Themes from Prior. Aalborg University Press: pp. 63-82. (Logic and Philosophy of Time: Themes from Prior.
  13. ↑ Jakobsen, D. (2017) The Significance of the Prior-Smart Correspondence for the Rise of Tense-Logic. In: Hasle, P., Blackburn, P. and Øhrstrøm, P.(eds.): Logic and Philosophy of Time: Themes from Prior. Aalborg University Press: p 78. aauforlag.dk/UserFiles/file/Logic_and_Philosophy_of_Themes_from_Prior_ONLINE.pdf
  14. ↑ Prior, A.N., (1957) Time and Modality, Oxford University Press, p. vii
  15. ↑ Copeland, J., (1996) Prior's Life and Legacy, In Logic and Reality, Edited by Copeland, J. Oxford University Press, pp. 6)
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Copeland, J (1996), Prior's Life and Legacy, p. 6.
  17. ↑ Copeland, B. Jack (2020), Zalta, Edward N., ed., Arthur Prior (Spring 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/prior/, retrieved 2021-03-09, "Of the four technical papers that marked the explosive beginning of Prior’s career as a formal logician in 1952 (1952a-d), two concerned modal logic...His one recourse in the face of isolation was to read, and read he did. In logic he began by returning to W.E. Johnson. Next came J.N. Keynes’s Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic and then (in his own phrase) he got stuck into Principia Mathematica. He learned a lot about the history of the subject from Peirce, whom he found ‘unexpectedly magnificent’. An important discovery, in 1950, was Bochenski’s Précis de Logique Mathematique (Bochenski 1949). Prior was fascinated by the ‘very neat symbolic notation’ due to Łukasiewicz, and before long he turned his back completely on the more usual Peano-Russell notation" 
  18. ↑ Copeland, B. Jack (2020), Zalta, Edward N., ed., Arthur Prior (Spring 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/prior/, retrieved 2021-03-09, "This paper was the curtain raiser to Prior’s extensive study of Łukasiewicz’s work on modality, and thereafter he read Łukasiewicz widely...To judge by his references in The Craft, his first encounters with modern symbolic modal logic must have been the pioneering explorations by Lewis in his and Langford’s Symbolic Logic, Bochenski’s chapter ‘La Logique de la Modalité’ in his La Logique de Théophraste, and Feys’ article ‘Les Systèmes Formalisés des Modalités Aristotéliciennes’...An important discovery, in 1950, was Bochenski’s Précis de Logique Mathematique (Bochenski 1949). Prior was fascinated by the ‘very neat symbolic notation’ due to Łukasiewicz, and before long he turned his back completely on the more usual Peano-Russell notation." 
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Copeland, B. Jack (2020), Zalta, Edward N., ed., Arthur Prior (Spring 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/prior/, retrieved 2021-03-09, "This paper was the curtain raiser to Prior’s extensive study of Łukasiewicz’s work on modality, and thereafter he read Łukasiewicz widely—even material in Polish, saying ‘the symbols are so illuminating that the fact that the text is incomprehensible doesn’t much matter’." 
  20. ↑ Lejewski, C. (2006). Borchert, David. ed. Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2nd ed.). USA: Thomas Gale & MacMillan Reference. pp. 605–609. ISBN 0028657853. "...It must have stood high in the author's own estimation, for in 1995 he began translating it into English." 
  21. ↑ Copeland, B. Jack (2020), Zalta, Edward N., ed., Arthur Prior (Spring 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/prior/, retrieved 2021-03-09, "Prior was fascinated by the ‘very neat symbolic notation’ due to Łukasiewicz, and before long he turned his back completely on the more usual Peano-Russell notation...Formal Logic is steeped in Polish notation and the axiomatic method, and typifies Prior’s mature work." 
  22. ↑ Copeland, B. Jack (2020), Zalta, Edward N., ed., Arthur Prior (Spring 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/prior/, retrieved 2021-03-09, "This idea that tensed propositions are liable to be true at one time and false at another became central to Prior’s philosophy. In a summary of his views, composed nearly two decades later, he wrote: Certainly there are unchanging truths, but there are changing truths also, and it is a pity if logic ignores these, and leaves it … to comparatively informal ‘dialecticians’ to study the more ‘dynamic’ aspects of reality. (Prior 1996a: 46)" 
  23. ↑ Walter Carnielli; Claudio Pizzi (2008). Modalities and Multimodalities. Springer. p. 181. ISBN 978-1-4020-8589-5. https://books.google.com/books?id=XpAFM04G6BAC&pg=PA181. 

Further reading

The nearest thing to a biography of Prior is:

  • Copeland, B. J., 1996, "Prior's Life and Legacy," in his edited volume Logic and Reality: Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior, New York: Oxford University Press (pp. 519–32 of this volume contain a complete bibliography of Prior's known writings as of date).

An excellent survey of Prior's life and achievement is:

Ongoing research on the importance of Prior's philosophy and logic:

External links



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