Prior’s paradigm for the study of time and its methodological motivation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Logic and Philosophy of Time: Further Themes from Prior
2019
This paper argues that A.N. Prior’s invention of tense-logic constitutes a return of medieval logic in the philosophy of time. The argument proceeds from an analysis of W.V. Quine and P.W. Strawson’s 1953 discussion about the inability of formal logic to analyse the tenses of ordinary language. Recent discoveries in the A.N. Prior archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford reveal that J.J.C. Smart, in a letter to Prior, brought up their discussion in his rejection of Prior’s invention of tense-logic. The correspondence will be discussed in terms of the importance of Prior’s discovery of tense-logic and the presentation of this as a solution to the problem discussed by Strawson and Quine in The Syntax of Time Distinctions (1958, [9]). Recent discoveries reveal a close connection between this discussion and Prior’s discussion of future contingency in Diodoran Modality (1955, [7]). These discoveries support the conclusion of this paper, which argues that Quine’s insistence that modern l...
Logic and Philosophy of Time: Themes from Prior, Volume 1
2017
A.N. Prior’s Past, Present and Future [18] was published 50 years ago in 1967 and was clearly a milestone in the development of tense-logic. It is a mature and comprehensive presentation of the basic concepts, systems and issues in tense-logic. In addition it also contains a number of interesting ideas that later led to important further developments of the field. Past, Present and Future represents a culmination of Prior’s struggle with the problem of determinism (including his study of the tension between the doctrines of divine foreknowledge and human freedom). Prior’s study of the problem of determinism led him to a reconstruction of the famous DiodoreanMaster Argument which had for centuries been regarded as a strong argument in favour of determinism. In his further analysis of the problem, hemade extensive use of tense-logic and the idea of branching time. However, in Past, Present and Future Prior also stresses that time as such should not simply be understood in terms of bra...
Logic and Philosophy of Time: Themes from Prior
2017
A.N. Prior (1914-69) in the course of the 1950s and 1960s founded a new and revolutionary paradigm in philosophy and logic. Its most central feature is the preoccupation with time and the development of the logic of time. However, this was inseparably interwoven with fundamental questions about human freedom, ethics, and existence. This remarkable integration of themes also embodies an original and in fact revolutionary conception of logic. The book series, Logic and Philosophy of Time, is dedicated to a deep investigation and also the further development of Prior's paradigm.
2019
This is the second volume of a collection of papers centered on the work of Arthur Prior. It draws on material presented at two conferences: one held in Copenhagen from 22nd-24th November 2017, and a shorter event held at Roskilde University on 2nd March 2018 as part of the Annual Meeting of the Danish Philosophical Society. 1 Like its predecessor, this collection is broad in sweep: it contains papers discussing the history of Arthur Prior's life and work, papers on philosophical themes introduced, elaborated, or alluded to by Prior, and papers that draw their inspiration from Arthur Prior's rich and varied contributions to logic. This subdivision is hardly sharp. Many contributions -much in the spirit of Prior's own work -move easily between history, philosophy, and logic. Moreover, like its predecessor, this volume concludes with a paper that views the Prior Internet Resources from the perspective of the digital humanities. In short, both volumes illustrate the breadth of the Prior Project, the topic to which we now turn. "Prior Project" is a usefully ambiguous term. It can be read as referring to aspects of Arthur Prior's own lifelong intellectual project, an exploration which wove his life and work tightly together. For example, Prior wrestled with theological issues (such as predestination) and these fed back into his writing (in the case of predestination, via his work on branching time).
Taking Times Out: Tense Logic as a Theory of Time
Ulrich Meyer’s book The Nature of Time uses tense logic to argue for a ‘modal’ view of time, which replaces substantial times (as in Newton’s Absolute Time) with ‘ersatz times’ constructed using conceptually basic tense operators. He also argues against Bertrand Russell’s relationist theory, in which times are classes of events, and against the idea that relativity compels the integration of time and space (called by Meyer the Inseparability Argument). I find fault with each of these negative arguments, as well as with Meyer’s purported reconstruction of empty spacetime from tense operators and substantial spatial points. I suggest that Meyer’s positive project is best conceived as an elimination of time in the mode of Julian Barbour's The End of Time.
Between the Time of Physics and the Time of Metaphysics, the Time of Tense Logic?
Einstein vs. Bergson
Accordingt oR ussell, Being is divided into atemporal universals and temporal particulars. But,t ot he extent that the Antisthene'sc aballeity pops up in the topos noeton,the ancestors of the horse must precede the horse in the sublunar. Thus, Being must be divided into Sosein, Dasein and Zeitsein. Onlythe Whiteheadian "eternal objects",s uch as geometricalf orms and colours,a re atemporal universals, while caballeity is in the Zeitsein togetherw ith Conquérant (one among Napoleon'sh orses). In this ontology,a ccordingt ot he Lautmanian shift, Spatiotemporality pertains to the Sosein and has at wo-fold structure: logical and mathematical. The tensel ogic of A.N.P rior describes it,while its link with the mathematics of spacetime is fixed by the Boolean kernel in the vonNeumann algebraf or quantum logic. Thiss peculation will be precededb yanarrative exposition of elementaryt ense logic. *Iam grateful to the all staff at the What is time? symposium for theirinvitation and generous hospitality.Great thanks are especiallydue to RoccoRonchi for his marked concerns, to Elie During for the courtesy of his discussion and to AlessandraC ampof or the truth of her philosophical enthusiasm. As pecial thanks is for the anonymous reviewer of this paper. 1T he Tale of TenseL ogic Tense logic is avariety of temporal logic, and temporallogic is abranch of modal logic. Thus, in order to give ashort history of tenselogic, we must start by tracing as hort genealogyo ft he modal logic.¹ The latter has threem ain moments: the Leibnizian foundation,t he Kripkean mathematization and the creation of tense logic by Arthur Prior. See Blackburn,D eR ijkea nd Venema (2001). Arthur Prior and Hybrid Logic is af ascinating paper which focuses on the morep romisingl ines of thoughti nt he area.
Philosophy in Review, 2013
This book advertises itself as an exploration of the world-time parallel, that is, the parallel between the modal dimension, on the one hand, and the temporal dimension, on the other. It is that, and much more. As the authors point out, there is reasonable agreement that we can model times, through temporal logic, in ways that are analogous to those by which we model modality through the logic of possible worlds. But this formal parallel has almost universally been taken to be merely a formal parallel, that is to say, the assumption has been that no metaphysical conclusions ought to be drawn from it. Thus, it is generally thought that one is free to accept an argument for actualism, say, but to reject a parallel argument for presentism. Rini and Cresswell compellingly argue that this is a mistake: the temporal and the modal are more than merely formally analogous. Abstracting from the interesting central question about the status of the world-time parallel, this book is of interest to anyone who desires clarity about propositional content, de se knowledge (and indexicality more generally) and of course tense and modality. In part because the authors do not wish to prejudge any metaphysical disputes-in particular they do not want to take a stand on whether one ought to be a possibilist rather than an actualist, or an eternalist rather than a presentist-they scrupulously offer very careful explications of current actualist and possibilist modal semantics as well as eternalist and presentist tense semantics. The book is rich with careful detail. It is full of places where various confusions are cleared away. Indeed, there is so much packed into the various discussions that it is difficult to know where to start a review. So rather than try and offer a very potted cook's tour of the book, in what follows I offer just a small taste of one of the issues canvassed.
Tense Logic and Ontology of Time
Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops 2021 Episode VII: The Bolzano Summer of Knowledge co-located with the 12th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2021), and the 12th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO 2021), 2021
This work aims to make tense logic a more robust tool for ontologists, philosophers, knowledge engineers and programmers by outlining a fusion of tense logic and ontology of time. In order to make tense logic better understandable, the central formal primitives of standard tense logic are derived as theorems from an informal and intuitive ontology of time. In order to make formulation of temporal propositions easier, temporal operators that were introduced by Georg Henrik von Wright are developed, and mapped to the ontology of time.
Tense and temporal reference. Hybrid temporal logic
Logique et Analyse Vol.55 No.220, 2012
Prior's approach to time has been neglected by semanticists for several reasons. The main one, we believe, is the inability of Priorean tense logic to refer to times. The second one, is the inability to account for some important features of natural language such as temporal anaphora and the role of temporal constructions in discourse. Priorean tense logic has, however, one important advantage over other accounts: the internal perspective of time (due to its modal nature). This paper examines extensions of Priorean tense logic in which reference to times is possible, focusing on the so-called hybrid temporal logic. We will outline some of its main features and analyze some of its philosophical implications.
Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 2010
Time is the grand stage where human activities take place (rational or otherwise). And the view of a branching temporal universe, or tree of possible events, with our actual history linearly advancing through it, is a widely shared cultural idea, not confined to Academia (cf. Borges brilliant 1941 essay El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan). Even though logic is often considered a study of timeless propositions, temporal languages and logics over tree structures have a long tradition. Philosophers have studied temporal structure and temporal reasoning since the 1950s, from the 'tense logic' of Prior (1967) to the 'STIT' system of Belnap et al. (2001). Moreover, starting from 1970s, computer scientists have joined in, and developed many further flavours of temporal logic, with major strands such as Pnueli on program correctness (Manna and Pnueli 1991), Emerson and Clarke on process specification and verification (Emerson and Clarke 1980, 1982), Reiter on the situation calculus in AI (Reiter 2001), and Thomas on the automata-theoretic foundations of computing (Thomas 1990). In addition, the pure first-and second-order logic of tree-like structures, starting from Rabin's classic decidability result (Rabin 1969), provides deeper background (cf. Grädel et al. (2002)). The chapter by Hodkinson and Reynolds on 'Temporal Logic' in the Handbook of Modal Logic (Hodkinson and Reynolds 2006) brings together many of these trends in one mathematical narrative. But the field of reasoning in, and about, time can be mapped out in many further ways: Van Benthems chapter 'Temporal Logic' in the