Essays On Logic

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31676, 11 May 1968, Page 4

Essays On Logic

Paper* on Time and Tense. By Arthur N. Prior. Oxford. 166 ppi

This is a collection of essays, most of which are discursive in style, but five of which demand a knowledge of symbolic logic in the Polish notation. Prior’s work is perhaps better known in Canterbury than its technical content would suggest because of the author’s local associations; he is undoubtedly the most eminent contemporary philosopher originating in New Zealand.

It is of some help, to have read at least parts of Prior’s two earlier books “Time and Modality” and “Past, Present and Future,” but the deceptively limpid style of some of these essays may tempt the new reader. Whilst the general theme of the book is time, in the sens* that it is involved when we ask and try to answer such questions as “does time really flow or pass?” and “doe* the rate at which time passe* itself vary with time?” topics range widely from * consideration of divine omniscience to the identification of individual*; what would the world be like if Ho Chi Minh had all the properties of President Johnson and President Johnson had all th* properties of Ho Chi Minh? This is not a political joke; it is the same question in essence about any two person* one cares to mention.

Each of th* thirteen essays is tightly argued and intricate in its logical structure, so the book as a whole defies summary. One essay on “the consequence* of actions” may be singled out because it touches on responsibility when an individual is involved in a complicated situation. From the old nursery rhyme “For want of a nail the shoe was lost” Prior invites us to consider to what extent we can hold an incompetent blacksmith’s assistant to blame for the loss of a kingdom. The example 1* from “Mother Goose,” but the problem is very pertinent; it arises whenever there is ah enquiry into the causes of a disaster which is not to be written off as an Act of God. Prior concludes that whilst we can say what an individual's duty is, if he has duties at all, we cannot reasonably ever hold him responsible for the total consequences of his actions, because he can never be expected to foresee all these consequences.

There is a sense in which we are the logical cause of the consequences of our action* and omissions, but not the morally responsible cause, and this holds whether we are determinists or not We are not invited by Prior to consider what meaning the lawyers’ “reasonably foreseeable consequences” has; but then it is not always immediately clear whether lawyer* are talking from a standpoint of logic, psychology, or expoIdiency.