Arthur Prior and ‘Now’

Synthese 193 (11) (2016)
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Abstract

On the 4th of December 1967, Hans Kamp sent his UCLA seminar notes on the logic of ‘now’ to Arthur N. Prior. Kamp’s two-dimensional analysis stimulated Prior to an intense burst of creativity in which he sought to integrate Kamp’s work into tense logic using a one-dimensional approach. Prior’s search led him through the work of Castañeda, and back to his own work on hybrid logic: the first made temporal reference philosophically respectable, the second made it technically feasible in a modal framework. With the aid of hybrid logic, Prior built a bridge from a two-dimensional UT calculus to a one-dimensional tense logic containing the ‘now’ operator J. Drawing on material from the Prior archive, and the paper “‘Now”’ that detailed Prior’s findings, we retell this story. We focus on Prior’s completeness conjecture for the hybrid system and the role played by temporal reference

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Patrick Blackburn
Roskilde University

Citations of this work

Now‐thoughts.Komarine Romdenh-Romluc - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (2):623-638.

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References found in this work

Modal logic with names.George Gargov & Valentin Goranko - 1993 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 22 (6):607 - 636.
Now.Arthur Prior - 1968 - Noûs 2 (2):101-119.
Hybrid languages.Patrick Blackburn & Jerry Seligman - 1995 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 4 (3):251-272.
Arthur Prior and Hybrid Logic.Patrick Blackburn - 2006 - Synthese 150 (3):329-372.
Modal logic with functorial variables and a contingent constant.C. A. Meredith & A. N. Prior - 1965 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 6 (2):99-109.

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