Arthur Norman Prior

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Arthur Norman Prior (born December 4, 1914 in Masterton , New Zealand ; † October 6, 1969 in Trondheim , Norway ) was a New Zealand-British logician and philosopher who is part of the analytical philosophy of formal language . Prior founded modern temporal logic with his work Time and Modality (1957) , and he also made important contributions to intensional modal logic , particularly in the volume Objects of Thought (1971).

Life

Prior's education was entirely in New Zealand under the influence of John Niemeyer Findlay . Although he had only mediocre mathematical knowledge, he followed Karl Popper's vacancy in 1946 as a lecturer in philosophy and logic at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. In 1953 he was appointed professor. At the instigation of Gilbert Ryle , whom Prior had met in New Zealand in 1954, he spent a guest year at the University of Oxford in 1956 , that year giving the John Locke lectures, which were summarized in Time and Modality . During his time in Oxford, Prior also came into contact with Peter Geach , the co-editor of Wittgenstein's estate, the logic historian William Kneale, and corresponded with the young Saul Kripke . The revival of logic as a research area in Great Britain is said to have been clearly promoted by Prior's commitment. 1959 to 1966 he was professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester . From 1966 he was a lifetime fellow and "tutor in philosophy" at Balliol College , Oxford. His students include Osmund Lewry , Max Cresswell , Kit Fine , Patrick Blackburn, and Robert Bull . Since 1963 he was a member of the British Academy .

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In Time and Modality , a fundamental contribution to the logic of time and the philosophy of time , Prior represented a so-called A-theory of time, according to which the temporal modalities past, present and future are to be understood absolutely and not relatively and are ontologically fundamental. Nevertheless, Prior regards categorical statements such as "The subject is sitting" as a complete statement that has different truth values at different points in time . This is opposed to the view that such a sentence must be supplemented with time and place information in order to clearly define its truth conditions. This view had been dominant since Gottlob Frege's time; it is linked to the metaphysical notion of a block universe . Prior's position is considered the first rigid-formal formulation of such an actualism .

Prior was almost completely self-taught in terms of modern formal logic and did not publish his first contribution to this area until he was 38 (1952), after having dealt intensively with the work of Joseph Maria Bocheński and Jan Łukasiewicz , which were then only partially submitted in English translation. Prior therefore used the Polish notation throughout . Prior 1955 presented the result of his preoccupation with logic from the early years. In his work on the logic of time, Prior systematically and extensively defended the view that reality is structured in time, which is made up of solid, three-dimensional objects that are continuous throughout its existence are present (see also four-dimensionalism ).

Prior also showed a keen interest in the history of logic and is one of the first logicians in the English-speaking world to appreciate the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and to consider the distinction between de re and de dicto in modal logic . Prior's engagement with modal logic as a teacher and researcher comes at a time when these topics were otherwise neglected and which preceded the boom that Kripke triggered with the suggestion of possible worlds semantics. Willard Van Orman Quine had even decidedly rejected approaches of the intensional modal logic advocated by Rudolf Carnap .

Recently, Prior has also pioneered the hybrid logic that stands between modal propositional logic and logic of the first level (see also non-classical logic ). In his attempt to combine binary and single-digit time logic operators in a formal system (e.g. "() until ()" and "() will always be" in Past, Present, and Future (1967)) Prior created an unintentional one Example of later hybrid systems. In Time and Modality , Prior had also tried out the use of multi-valued logic to solve the problem of empty proper names .

Prior's works represent a fruitful connection between formal innovations and language analysis in both a philosophical and a formal respect. According to Prior, natural language can be the source not only of logical errors, but also of buried insights. His meticulous examination of opposing positions has helped a lot to develop alternatives to his own point of view.

Publications

The following list includes both monographs and edited volumes:

  • Logic and the Basis of Ethics , Oxford University Press, 1959 ( ISBN 0-19-824157-7 )
  • Formal logic . Oxford University Press 1955, 1962
  • Time and Modality . Oxford University Press 1957 based on the 1956 John Locke lectures ( ISBN 978-0198241584 )
  • Past, Present and Future . Oxford University Press, 1967
  • Papers on Time and Tense . Oxford University Press, 1968
  • Objects of Thought . Published by PT Geach and AJP Kenny, Oxford University Press, 1971
  • The Doctrine of Propositions and Terms . Edited by PT Geach and AJP Kenny, Duckworth, London 1976
  • Papers in Logic and Ethics . Edited by PT Geach and AJP Kenny, Duckworth, London 1976
  • Worlds, Times and Selves . Published by Kit Fine. London: Duckworth, 1977
  • Papers on Time and Tense . Re-edited by Per Hasle, Peter Øhrstrøm, Torben Braüner & Jack Copeland. Oxford University Press, 2003

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christopher Menzel:  Actualism. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
  2. ^ Walter Carnielli, Claudio Pizzi: Modalities and Multimodalities . Springer, 2008, ISBN 9781402085895 , p. 181.
  3. ↑ "... usage can enshrine the folly or timidity as well as the wisdom of our ancestors," Objects of Thought , p 33 Google book preview
personal data
SURNAME Prior, Arthur Norman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Prior, Arthur; Prior, Arthur N.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand-British philosopher and logician
DATE OF BIRTH 4th December 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Masterton , New Zealand
DATE OF DEATH October 6, 1969
Place of death Trondheim , Norway