Past, Present and Future

Past, Present and Future, first published in 1867, is the magnum opus of Arthur Norman Prior (1914-1969).Prior was the founding father of tense-logic: Past, Present, and Future presents his tense-logic as a powerful and precise formalism for the systematic study of the temporal aspects of reality.The book was the summation of a decade of work on tense-logic following Prior's John Locke lectures at the University of Oxford in 1956, subsequently published in 1957 as Time and Modality.Among a wide range of topics, Past, Present and Future investigates the idea of branching time that had earlier been suggested by Saul Kripke.It includes several philosophical investigations of time, from a discussion of McTaggart's paradox, the Master Argument of Diodorus, time and existence, problems regarding determinism and future contingency.Prior's discussion of these matters invited a broad scope of ancient and medieval philosophers into the modern discussion in the philosophy of time.Prior was spearh