Arthur Norman Prior (1914-69) was a logician and philosopher from New Zealand who contributed crucially to the development of ‘non-standard’ logics, especially of the modal variety. His greatest achievement was the invention of modern temporal logic, worked out in close connection with modal logic. However, his work in logic had a much broader scope. He was also the founder of hybrid logic, and he made important contributions to deontic logic, modal logic, the theory of quantification, the nature of propositions and (...) the history of logic. In addition, he discussed questions of ethics, free will, and general theology. Prior’s philosophical works comprise about 200 titles. His earliest articles center on philosophical theology and historical studies of Scottish Reformed Theology. This led on to the publication of his first influential work on ethics: Logic and The Basis of Ethics (1949). With the invention of tense-logic in the early 1950s, his focus shifted to investigations into the syntax of tempo-modal logic leading to his seminal Time and Modality (1957), a volume derived from his John Locke Lectures in Oxford in 1956. Furthermore Prior, together with the Irish mathematician and logician C.A. Meredith (1904-76), made important early contributions to the semantics of possible worlds. Prior’s tense-logic provided a strong conceptual framework for problems pertaining to the philosophy of time. In Time and Modality, Prior discussed the philosophical implications of Ruth Barcan’s famous formulae for tense-logic, and in the 1960s he worked on the notion of the present. The most persistent problem running through Prior’s work is his study of the questions surrounding human freedom and divine foreknowledge, and more general philosophical problems emerging from this classical theological question. His thorough analysis of this problem, with the conceptual tools of tense-logic, received a crucial impetus from his correspondence with the young Saul Kripke, when the latter suggested the semantic tool of branching time to Prior. Prior’s development of two solutions based on branching time for the problem of future contingency, the Peircean and the Ockham solution, was most thoroughly developed in Past, Present and Future (1967), the most important work published by Prior. Characteristically for Prior’s methodological approach, the development of these two solutions were at the same time a development of two new systems of tense logic, and vice versa. One of Prior’s significant contributions to logic was his work on world propositions and instant propositions. In the course of developing these notions he also made one of the earliest formulations of hybrid logic. In Papers on Time and Tense (1968), he presented this idea in a more detailed manner in the context of his four grades of tense-logical involvement. (shrink)

This book is an edited collection of papers from international experts in philosophy and psychology concerned with time. The collection aims to bridge the gap between these disciplines by focussing on five key themes and providing philosophical and psychological perspectives on each theme. -/- The first theme is the concept of time. The discussion ranges from the folk concept of time to the notion of time in logic, philosophy and psychology. The second theme concerns the notion of present in the (...) philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and psychology. The third theme relates to continuity and flow of time in mind. One of the key questions in this section is how the apparent temporal continuity of conscious experience relates to the possibly discrete character of underlying neural processes. The fourth theme is the timing of experiences, with a focus on the perception of simultaneity and illusions of temporal order. Such effects are treated as test cases for hypotheses about the relationship between the subjective temporal order of experience and the objective order of neural events. The fifth and the final theme of the volume is time and intersubjectivity. This section examines the role of time in interpersonal coordination and in the development of social skills. -/- The collection will appeal to both psychologists and philosophers, but also to researchers from other disciplines who seek an accessible overview of the research on time in psychology and philosophy. (shrink)