William J. Prior (1946-2026)

William J. Prior, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, has died. The following obituary is by Elizabeth Radcliffe. William J. Prior (1946-2026) William J. Prior, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, died on April 23rd, 2026, a few weeks short of his 80th birthday. Professor Prior is best known for his work on Socrates and Plato. Over the course of his career, Professor Prior published many articles and reviews, mainly in ancient Greek philosophy. He authored four books: Unity and Development in Plato’s Metaphysics (1985), Virtue and Knowledge (1991), Ancient Philosophy: A Beginner’s Guide (2016) and Socrates (2019). He edited two four-volume collections of articles on the philosophy of Socrates, Socrates: Critical Assessments, published in 1996 and 2018 by Routledge. The publisher calls these volumes “a collection of some of the most significant scholarship published on the philosophy of Socrates in the last half century.” Professor Prior, known as “Bill” by friends and colleagues, received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. He started his career in 1976 at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was tenured and taught for eleven years. During this time, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities in Madison, Wisconsin, and a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and at UCLA in different terms. Bill took a position at Santa Clara University in 1986 and taught there for twenty-seven years until his retirement in 2013. He believed strongly in the value of a liberal arts education, and his contributions to the university and the department at Santa Clara were significant. In those years, he served as Chair of the Philosophy Department, Director of the Honors Program, and the first Director of the University’s Residential Learning Communities program. On campus, Bill was an influential and gifted undergraduate teacher and mentor, with many of his students bound for professional schools and now in successful careers. He regarded philosophy, not as an academic discipline, but as a way of life, and the reflective manner with which he interacted with colleagues, students, and friends showed this. At SCU, he received awards for excellence in curriculum innovation, in advising, and in teaching, in addition to.. The post William J. Prior (1946-2026) first appeared on Daily Nous.