  At Canterbury he was thrown entirely on his own resources, being as he put it ‘the only philosopher about the place’. Prior bore the responsibility for providing a broad and balanced philosophy curriculum, yet his own formal education in philosophy had stopped short nine years previously. His one recourse in the face of isolation was to read, and read he did. In logic he began by returning to W.E. Johnson. Next came J.N. Keynes’s Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic and then (in his own phrase) he got stuck into Principia Mathematica. He learned a lot about the history of the subject from Peirce, whom he found ‘unexpectedly magnificent’. An important discovery, in 1950, was Bochenski’s Précis de Logique Mathematique (Bochenski 1949). Prior was fascinated by the ‘very neat symbolic notation’ due to Łukasiewicz, and before long he turned his back completely on the more usual Peano-Russell notation. In Łukasiewicz’s parenthesis-free notation, C\(pq\) is written for ‘If \(p\) then \(q\)’, and Bochenski was later to describe Prior as even more of a ‘CCCC-logician’ than he was himself. Łukasiewicz’s own Aristotle’s Syllogistic and Tarski’s Introduction to Logic soon followed. By now the logic bug had well and truly bitten. Prior saw from the work of the Poles that formal precision is possible in philosophy and this delighted him. The upshot of Prior’s reading for the curriculum was that his students learned Aristotelian and medieval logic, using Polish notation and with Bochenski’s Précis de Logique Mathematique as a text. ‘Despite the language difficulty, I have found this a first-class textbook to accompany lectures to New Zealand students’, Prior declared (1952c: 35).