Arthur Norman Prior was born on December 4 at Masterton, near Wellington, New Zealand. He acknowledged an early philosophical debt to John Findlay. But his first academic post was at Canterbury University College, where he succeeded Karl Popper. He was the visiting John Locke Lecturer at Oxford in 1956, and in 1958 he was appointed a professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester. After short periods as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and at the University of California at Los Angeles, he moved in 1966 to a tutorial fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford, and Oxford University appointed him to a concurrent readership.

Prior's early intellectual interests were very much religious in character. He was influenced for several years by the theologian Arthur Miller, who combined a strict adherence to Presbyterian doctrine with an equally strong support for socialism and opposition to nationalism...