Arthur N. Prior and Leśniewski’s Concept of Names

Abstract

For a certain period, the concept of names that Stanisław Leśniewski and his followers developed had a certain impact on the concept that appeared in Arthur Prior’s temporal ontology. However, this impact seemed to vanish in time. The aim of this paper is to present why Prior was interested in Leśniewski’s concept of names and quantification and to discuss why in Prior’s later works Leśniewski’s influence is not as apparent as it was in the first works on temporal logic. Namely, the paper suggests three possible solutions; the differences that were between Prior and Leśniewski’s views on time and determinism, new concepts of names that occurred at that time, and Leśniewski’s extensionalism that opposed Prior’s preference for intensional logic.