CFP: Arthur Prior Centenary Conference

Submission deadline: October 14, 2013

Conference date(s):
August 21, 2014 - August 22, 2014

Go to the conference's page

Conference Venue:

Balliol College, Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom

Topic areas

Details

A two-day Centenary Conference will be held at Balliol College, Oxford, on 21-22 August 2014, in order to celebrate the contributions of Arthur Norman Prior (1914-1969), and to showcase logical, philosophical, mathematical and computational research concerned with, or inspired by, Prior’s work. A lasting outcome of the conference will be a volume of the papers presented at Balliol.

Background

A. N. Prior was born on 4 December 1914 in Masterton, New Zealand. He studied philosophy in New Zealand in the Thirties and was a significant and often provocative voice in New Zealand theological debates at this time and also well into the Forties. In 1946, he became a lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand, and then Professor there in 1949. In 1959 he moved to a chair of philosophy at Manchester University, then he moved to Oxford where he became a fellow of Balliol College in 1965. Prior died on 6 October 1969 in Trondheim, Norway.

Prior contributed to the debates about numerous philosophical issues but is best known for his logic of time - or tense logic, as he himself preferred to call it, although temporal logic has now become the most common designation of the discipline. Prior established and developed his temporal logic from 1953 until his death in 1969. Within the last two decades, the importance of his achievements in temporal logic have been recognized, and Prior has found his place as one of the great logicians of the Twentieth Century. It has also been increasingly recognized that Prior made other highly original contributions, whose importance has been overshadowed by his invention of temporal logic. These include contributions to theology, especially the problem of predestination, and to the philosophy of ethics, and his invention of one of the most important disciplines in logic today, hybrid logic. The diversity of these contributions notwithstanding, one red thread runs through all Prior’s work: the study of time and its logic. (See more on Prior’s life and philosophy here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prior/)

The Virtual Lab for Prior Studies

A website for Prior Studies is available at http://research.prior.aau.dk. This website serves as a portal to Prior’s papers in the Bodleian Library and elsewhere, as well as supplying notes on some of the papers and an introduction to Prior’s life and work, including a curriculum vitae and a comprehensive bibliography. Work is in progress to digitize and so make readily available on the web as much of Prior's unpublished work as possible. The latest version of the Prior site will be officially launched at the Centenary Conference.

The Virtual Lab for Prior Studies makes material in Prior’s Nachlass available to researchers who aim to contribute to the Centenary Conference. Researchers who are considering submitting a paper for the Centenary Conference are most welcome to join The Virtual Lab for Prior Studies.

Submissions

Papers are invited for the Arthur Prior Centenary Conference. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

  • Prior’s contributions to temporal logic
  • Prior’s contributions to hybrid logic
  • Prior on tense logic and indeterminism
  • Prior’s presentism
  • Prior’s early work on theology and ethics
  • The development and use of Prior’s ideas in computer science and the information sciences

In general, authors are invited to submit papers relating to all aspects of Prior’s work. Submissions discussing papers in Prior’s Nachlass will be of especial interest.
Papers accepted for, or under review by, journals or other conferences should not be submitted to the Arthur Prior Centenary Conference.
Initial submission of an extended abstract (3-5 pages) will be through EasyChair. All abstracts will be peer reviewed. All accepted papers will be presented at the conference and may subsequently be published in a high profile volume.

Deadlines

August 12, 2013:   Extended abstracts (3-5 pages) in PDF format submitted via https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=anp2014.
Sept. 16, 2013:      Notification of the outcome of the review process.

Conference organization

The conference will take place at Balliol College, Oxford. There will be rooms for up to 60 attendees available in College, at a discounted rate, from August 20-23, 2014 (3 nights).  Prices and further information regarding registration etc. will appear soon.
The conference is supported by Balliol College, and sponsored by The Royal School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen University, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and Aalborg University, Denmark.

Conference web-site:
http://conference.prior.aau.dk

Conference programme committee
Professor Dr. Per Hasle, The Royal School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen University, Denmark (General Chair)
Professor Dr. Jack Copeland, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (New Zealand Chair)
Professor Dr. Peter Øhrstrøm, Aalborg University, Denmark (Program Chair)
Professor Dr. Thomas Müller, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Professor Dr. Thomas Ploug, Aalborg University, Denmark

Supporting material

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