Worlds, Times and Selves

Amherst: Univ of Massachusetts Pr, 1977. Ex-Library. Hardcover. Very Good-/None. Black cloth boards with bright gilt block titling on the spine. Front board leans evenly forward, only 2mm. Binding is sound. Usual university library treatment with scars to pastedowns where bookplates/envelopes were removed, erased Dewey number and ink stamp on copyright page and small blindstamp to contents page. The text is unmarked. Upper page edges lightly toned/foxed. Lacking dustjacket. 8vo. (5 5/8 x 8.75 ins.) Our photos depict actual book offered for sale. Books are carefully packaged by hand and shipped from our family-owned bookshop in Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. BOOK INFO: See photos for Table of Contents. \n'Before he died, Prior was working on a book to be entitled Worlds, Times and Selves...to deal...with the interplay between modal or tense logic, on the one hand, and quantification theory on the other. One of its main concerns was to show that modal and tense logic could stand on their own, that talk of possible worlds or instants was to be reduced to them rather than the other way round. Unfortunately, only the first chapter was completed. There were jottings for other chapters, but they were far from complete. However, it is clear that some of [his] recently published papers would have been incorporated.... So what I have tried to do is to collate the...material in such a way that the result is as close as possible to the book he had in mind. The first paper explains in very simple terms the parallel between modal logic and quanitification theory. It is a good introduction to the technical and philosophical problems that arise in the later papers. The next three papers deal with the egocentric counterpart to ordinary tense or modal logic. They introduce the operator Q that picks out those propositions that correspond to instants, worlds, or selves, as the case may be. The last sections of 2 and 4 and most of the supplement 3 are concerned with the formal development of Q or cognate notions. The last three of Prior's papers, 5-7, deal with the problem of embedding the theory of instants or possible worlds within orthodox tense and modal logic respectively. Chapter 5 attempts to see how far the opposite view can be maintained. Chapter 6 is a particularly rich paper. It deals...with a world-calculus for the system Q, the logic of significance, and the extension of embedding results to possibilist quantifiers.... In the postscript, I have tried to fill this gap [on the question of embedding] by discussing in detail his proposal for explaining instants and possible worlds within tense or modal logic.' (-from the Preface). With a technical appendix. Includes indexes of symbols and names, and general (subject).