A Uniform Analysis of 'Before' and 'After'

Before and after have closely related meanings. How close? A uniform analysis would make their semantics differ only with respect to the direction of a temporal ordering relation. Now one might think that before and after can not only be analyzed uniformly, but can be analyzed directly as temporal relations, with no more to be said about their meanings. In that case they would be logical converses, in the same way that the relations earlier than and later than are logical converses. In support of such a simple and intuitive account of before and after, (1) is true iff (2) is: