  It was John Findlay, Professor of Philosophy at Otago, who introduced Prior to logic. Findlay, a contemporary of Gilbert Ryle and William Kneale, had studied at Oxford and at Graz; his influential book Meinong’s Theory of Objects and Values was published during Prior’s second year at Otago. Under Findlay’s direction, Prior studied the 18th century British moralists and cut his teeth on W.E. Johnson’s classic text Logic. It was Findlay who first aroused his interest in the history of logic. In correspondence, Prior described Findlay’s Otago lectures as ‘thrilling’, and remarked that his offprint of Findlay’s 1936 article ‘Relational Properties’ was one of his ‘most valued literary possessions’. In 1949 he wrote of Findlay, ‘I owe to his teaching, directly or indirectly, almost all that I know of either Logic or Ethics’ (1949: xi), and he was later generously to describe Findlay as ‘the founding father of modern tense-logic’ (1967a: 1).