Arthur Norman Pr'or

Background

Pr'or, Arthur Norman was born on December 4, 1914 in Masterton, Ncw Zealand.

Career

1937, Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Otago. 1946-1949. Lecturer. 1949-1952, Peader, 1953-1958, Professor, Canterbury University College, New Zealand. 1959-1966, Professor of Philosophy, University of Manchester.

1966-1969, Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

Views

Prior's earliest significant philosophical work was in the foundations of ethics. In his first book. Logic and the Basis of Ethics (1949), he traced the eighteenth-century precursors of the twentiethcentury critique of ethical naturalism. At that time Prior was himself a non-naturalist, although he would subsequently change his mind on this subject. He was already taking a keen interest in the logic of ‘ought’ statements and the notion of a special deontic logic. In the 1950s his interests turned increasingly to formal logic. He entered into correspondence with Lukasiewicz, and became—for the rest of his life—a fervent champion of 'Polish Notation’ in logic. At this period Prior contributed numerous articles to the Journal of Symbolic Logic, a journal he would later edit. He also developed a lifelong interest in the history of logic, writing a number of articles on ancient and medieval logicians. Prior’s greatest contribution to twentiethcentury philosophy is his invention of tense logic. His early commitment to Calvinism had led him to think long and hard about predestination and foreknowledge; his later reflections owe more to Aristotle's conviction that the future is still open and indeterminate. In the early 1950s he saw how to develop a system of tense logic based on a formal analogy with modal logic. For ‘possibly p’ read ‘p now or in the future’; for ‘p is not possible’, read ‘not p now or in the future’. In 1955-1956 Prior visited Oxford and delivered the fruits of these reflections as the John Locke Lectures, later published as Time and Modality (1957). In the philosophy of time. Prior opposed the view that tense words like ‘now’ are token-reflexives. In his Papers on Time and Tense (1968) he argues for the reality of the ‘flow of time', and expresses support for the metaphysical view that only the present truly exists. Likewise in the realm of modality, Prior was a committed ‘actualist’, claiming that modal idioms like ‘possibly’ and ‘necessarily’ are primitive, and that only actual objects exist. A frequent target for Prior’s critical papers was Willard Van Orman Quine, for whom Prior nevertheless had considerable affection and respect. In an important paper given at Helsinki in 1962 he attacked Quine’s notion of referential opacity, and articulated the beginnings of what he felt was a superior account of belief-ascriptions such as ‘A believes that p'. A book with the title Objects of Thought was left unfinished at his death but was seen through publication by Peter Geach and Anthony Kenny in 1971. Prior’s influence on late twentieth-century philosophy has been extensive but diffuse. His importance lies in the number and variety of the logical tools he has added to the philosopher’s toolkit. Metaphysicians concerned with the passage of time, creation, necessity and possibility, and moral philosophers concerned with determinism, deliberation, the ‘openness’ of the future and the deontic category of the ‘to-be-done’, will alike find themselves in his debt.

Interests

• Ethics; metaphysics. £duc: University of Otago, Dunedin. New Zealand. infis: j0hn Findlay, and later Lukasiewicz. APpts: 1937, Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Otago.
  
  1946-1949. Lecturer. 1949-1952, Peader, 1953-1958, Professor, Canterbury University College, New Zealand. 1959-1966, Professor of Philosophy, University of Manchester. 1966-1969, Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.