Abstract
Though Arthur Prior is now best known for his founding of modern temporal logic and hybrid logic, much of his early philosophical career was devoted to history of logic and historical logic. This interest laid the foundations for both of his ground-breaking innovations in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the important rôle played by Prior’s research in ancient and medieval logic in his development of temporal and hybrid logic, any student of Prior, temporal logic, or hybrid logic should be familiar with the medieval logicians and their work. In this article we give an overview of Prior’s work in ancient and medieval logic.
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Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Peter Øhrstrøm for the invitation to write this paper, and for putting her in contact with Mary Prior, Arthur Prior’s widow, in Oxford. Many thanks are also due to Mary for her permission to study the Prior archives at the Bodleian and for her kind hospitality while in Oxford. The help of Colin Harris in the Modern Papers Room of the Bodleian is also gratefully acknowledged. Research for this paper was partially funded by the project “Dialogical Foundations of Semantics” (DiFoS) in the ESF EuroCoRes programme LogICCC (LogICCC-FP004; DN 231-80-002; CN 2008/08314/GW).
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Uckelman, S.L. Arthur Prior and medieval logic. Synthese 188, 349–366 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-9943-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-9943-3