It is common, even among the laity, the doubt about the reality of time. We think it is possible that time is an illusion and that the perception of his passage is just awareness of something other than time. There are a number of arguments made by philosophers, both to defend and to attack the intuition that time is real. One of them, and perhaps the best known, is the argument of McTaggart, which tries to establish some condition for (...) the existence of time and that time, thought through that condition and applied to reality, leads to a contradiction, which makes him conclude that time can not exist, and therefore does not exist. What I intend in this article is to present the argument of McTaggart along with some original and non-original objections, and try to show that if we accept the Prior’s approach of the flow of time, the cogency of the argument of McTaggart is lost. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how a solution to Lewis’ problem of temporary intrinsics is also a response to McTaggart’s argument that the A-series is incoherent. There are three strategies Lewis considers for solving the problem of temporary intrinsics: perdurantism, presentism, and property-indexing. William Lane Craig (Analysis 58(2):122–127, 1998) has examined how the three strategies fare with respect to McTaggart’s argument. The only viable solution Lewis considers to the problem of temporary intrinsics that also succeeds against McTaggart, (...) Craig claims, is presentism. This gives us prima facie reason to be presentists. But there is a strategy Craig does not consider-indexing, or relativizing, the copula. In this paper, I show that to the degree that indexing the copula solves the problem of temporary intrinsics, it also shows the invalidity of McTaggart’s argument. The upshot: the copula-indexer needn’t affirm the unreality of time, nor need she embrace presentism. (shrink)

McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time, first published in 1908, set the agenda for 20th-century philosophy of time. Yet there is very little agreement on what it actually says—nobody agrees with the conclusion, but still everybody finds something important in it. This book presents the first critical overview of the last century of debate on what is popularly called "McTaggart’s Paradox". Scholars have long assumed that McTaggart’s argument stands alone and does not rely on any contentious (...) ontological principles. The author demonstrates that these assumptions are incorrect—McTaggart himself explicitly claimed his argument to be dependent on the ontological principles that form the basis of his idealist metaphysics. The result is that scholars have proceeded to understand the argument on the basis of their own metaphysical assumptions, duly arriving at very different interpretations. This book offers an alternative reading of McTaggart’s argument, and at the same time explains why other commentators arrive at their mutually incompatible interpretations. It will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in the philosophy of time and other areas of contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

McTaggart, in his famous paper, “The Unreality of Time” (1908), argues in favor of the sceptical claim that time is unreal. His main argument is based on detecting a paradox in our ordinary descriptions of time or events occurring in time. Based on our common sense conception of time, time and the events happening in it can be described in two ways: either as having the properties of “being past”, “being present” and “being future”, or as having the properties (...) of “being earlier than”, “being later than”, or “being simultaneous with”. McTaggart argues that employing the second sort of properties fails to properly explain “change” in time. However, having assumed the essentiality of the first type of properties to time, McTaggart argues that these properties will themselves lead to a paradox, according to which all events are at the same time in the past, present, and future. In this essay, we are going to provide a clear exposition of McTaggart’s argument and briefly review some of the main responses to it. We will then show that McTaggart’s argument will amount to error-theory about the content of our utterances about time. We will then employ Boghossian’s argument against error-theory (1990) to show why McTaggart’s argument leads to paradoxical conclusions. (shrink)

Of the half dozen crucial arguments around which McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence centers, one is borrowed from Russell. It seeks to show that we are directly acquainted with a spiritual particular which is the referent of the pronoun “I,” or, as McTaggart put it, “the self is known to itself by direct perception.”.

McTaggart?s explanation of the human understanding of time, which uses the time series, is a significant moment in the history of philosophy, and his attempt to prove time?s unreality had strong but diverse reactions. The majority of thinkers who wrote after him agree that time is indeed real, but the intellectual division that was created around the question of which part of the paradox in dispute will dominate philosophy of time in the 20th and 21st century. It can be (...) concluded that both major theories within this field have an undeniable influence on the division of time series which McTaggart made. After analyzing the paradox, the focus will be on clarifying the debate between tensed and tenseless theorists. The former dispute the claim that the A-series is contradictory and argue that the tensed time is the proper determination of events in time, while the latter claim that the B-series is independent and that time can be determined only by temporal relations. By recognizing the differences between these two lines of thought, it will become easier to understand the nature of their relationship to the time series, namely by considering the ways in which they defend their own and attack the contrary view. nema. (shrink)

In his review of The Ontology of Time, Thomas Crisp (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2005a ) argues that Oaklander's version of McTaggart's paradox does not make any trouble for his version of presentism. The aim of this paper is to refute that claim by demonstrating that Crisp's version of presentism does indeed succumb to a version of McTaggart's argument. I shall proceed as follows. In Part I I shall explain Crisp's view and then argue in Part II that (...) his analysis of temporal becoming, temporal properties and temporal relations is inadequate. Finally, in Part III, I shall demonstrate that his presentist ontology of time is susceptible to the paradox he so assiduously sought to avoid. (shrink)

McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time is generally believed to be a self-contained argument independent of McTaggart's idealist ontology. I argue that this is mistaken. It is really a demonstration of a contradiction in the appearance of time, on the basis of certain a priori ontological axioms, in particular the thesis that all times exist in parity. When understood in this way, the argument is neither obscure or unfounded, but arguably does not address those versions of the (...) A-theory that deny that all times exist in parity. (shrink)

McTaggart argues that the A series, which orders events with reference to past, present, and future, involves an inescapable contradiction. The significant difference between the earlier version of his argument (Mind, 1908) and the version in The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Chapter 33 (1927), has often gone unnoticed. His arguments are all invalid; the conclusion can be rejected without rejecting any premiss. It is therefore unnecessary to adopt any philosophical thesis about time (e.g., that some token-reflexive analysis of (...) tensed statements is adequate) to avoid McTaggart's final conclusion that time is unreal. (shrink)

According to J. M. E. McTaggart, all that exists is spiritual, where spirituality is defined as “the quality of having content, all of which is the content of one or more selves”. In view of the importance which he thus assigns to selves, one properly expects of McTaggart a clear, certainly a consistent, account of what a self is. Yet the picture one receives remains clouded—clouded mainly by positions which may be contradictory within themselves, and by what plainly (...) look to be incompatibilities of one position with another. In this paper, I shall try to clarify, and insofar as possible to support, McTaggart’s doctrine. In part I shall be seeking to decide which ones, if any, of the seeming contradictions are genuinely unresolvable. And then, in case no one consistent doctrine can be educed, I shall ask which one of various alternative positions would be most in harmony with McTaggart’s system as a whole. (shrink)

This paper delves into McTaggart’s metaphysical account of reality without time, and compares and contrasts McTaggart’s account with the account of reality given by modern physics. This comparison is of interest, because there are suggestions from contemporary physics that there is no time at the fundamental level. Physicists and philosophers of physics recognize that we do not have a good understanding of how the world could be such that time is unreal. I argue that, from the perspective of (...) one who is trying to understand modern physics, McTaggart’s metaphysical views do provide some insight into how reality can be timeless at the fundamental level, but the insight that they provide is limited. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions on the nature of time begin with McTaggart, who introduces the distinction between what he takes to be the only two possible realist theories of time: the A-theory, maintaining that past, present, and future are absolute; and the B-theory, maintaining that they are relative. McTaggart argues against both theories to conclude that time is not real. In this paper, I reconstruct his argument against the A-theory. Then, I show that this argument is flawed. Finally, I draw (...) a lesson for those engaged in contemporary discussions on the nature of time. (shrink)

The article analyzes John McTaggart’s argument for unreality of time, a classical piece of fin de siècleBrittish idealist metaphysics. Having accepted the distinction between A-series and B-series, one can only resist McTaggartian conclusion by denying at least one of the two: that B-series alone is insufficient for change or that A-series implies a contradiction. Hugh Mellor’s criticism is taken to represent thisstrategy. The lesson to be learnt from this debate is that if the world is conceived as a mere (...) totality of facts no change could be real in such a world, and so McTaggart would right. However, if the reality of things determining those facts is recognized as more fundamental, it would not be denied that at least some of these things undergo genuine temporal change, and time as a dimension of this real change cannot be rejected. (shrink)

McTaggart’s theory of time is the locus classicus of the contemporary philosophy of time. However, despite its prominence, there is little agreement as to what the theory actually amounts. In this paper, it is first argued that, contrary to the received opinion, McTaggart’s A-time/B-time distinction is not a distinction between static and fluid temporal series. Rather, it is a certain distinction between two types of static temporal series. It is then shown that in his temporal transience paradox, (...) class='Hi'>McTaggart employs these two distinct notions of temporal series. The paper is concluded with the claim that McTaggart's temporal transience paradox is best understood not as a contradiction, but as a dilemma both horns of which are unsatisfactory. (shrink)

J. McTaggart argues that the philosophical conception of time is constituted by the notions of fluid and static time. Since, on his view, neither notion is philosophically viable, he concludes that time is nothing but an illusion that arises from our distorted perception of essentially atemporal reality. In the paper, I argue that despite McTaggart’s failure to prove the unreality of time as such, he does succeed in establishing his lesser claim that the concept of fluid time is (...) without any ontological import whatsoever. (shrink)

McTaggart’s Paradox has been considered a special case of Lewis’s Problem of Temporary Intrinsics (see Craig (1998), Rea (2003) and Rettler (2012)). I argue instead that the Problem of Temporary Intrinsics cannot simply be applied to the Problem of the passage of time and therefore that McTaggart’s Paradox cannot be a special case of the Problem of Temporary Intrinsics. This observation is relevant in order to point out the difference between the change in objects or events over time (...) (i.e. the subject of Lewis’s Problem) and the change (or passage) of time (i.e. the subject of McTaggart’s Paradox). (shrink)

McTaggart's negative thesis in his proof for the unreality of time, which contends that the A-series is contradictory, is still today upheld as a proof of the unreality of the properties of past, present, and future, and of the `flow of time'. In my paper, I defend the possibility of a complete and consistent description of the A-series, thus refuting McTaggart's negative thesis. I show that the failure to acknowledge the possibility of such a description is due to (...) an ambiguity in natural language. Once this ambiguity is clarified, and in light of the disanalogy between time and space, the usual description of the A-series, `Event e was future, is present, and will be past', is shown to be a successful description of the change in the temporal A-properties (the `flow of time'). (shrink)

McTaggart's negative thesis in his proof for the unreality of time, which contends that the A-series is contradictory, is still today upheld as a proof of the unreality of the properties of past, present, and future, and of the `flow of time'. In my paper, I defend the possibility of a complete and consistent description of the A-series, thus refuting McTaggart's negative thesis. I show that the failure to acknowledge the possibility of such a description is due to (...) an ambiguity in natural language. Once this ambiguity is clarified, and in light of the disanalogy between time and space, the usual description of the A-series, `Event e was future, is present, and will be past', is shown to be a successful description of the change in the temporal A-properties. (shrink)

One of the most notable theses of McTaggart’s system is his doctrine of logical determinism, the contention that—on grounds of fundamental logical principle—everything in the world must of necessity be just exactly as it is, that nothing could possibly differ in any particular from its actual condition. McTaggart holds that given that any substance in the world is what it in fact is, every substance must be just as is. And so “all that exists, both substances and [their] (...) characteristics, are held together in one system of extrinsic determination”. For “every fact about every other substance [different from the universe itself] extrinsically determines every fact about the universe, and…every fact about the universe extrinsically determines every fact about every other substance”. And, therefore, “the supposition that anything should be different from what it is, therefore, is one we have no right to make”. Things are bound up in one vast network of mutual necessitation. (shrink)

McTaggart maintained that, without the kind of change which events undergo in passing from the future through the present into the past, how things are would be fundamentally different from how they appear. More particularly Without A-change there could be no change at all. Without any change there could be no time. Without A-change there could be no time.

Asking “What is time?” can be both a simple and a profound question. In this article we intend to introduce the reader to the philosophy of time. To do so, we will deal with McTaggart's paradox. By explaining it and introducing the basic concepts to understand it, we will be able to get an idea of what this branch of philosophy is all about. The main intention of this article is not to explain anything new but to clarify the (...) background of a debate by explaining its roots. By taking a deep dive into the concept of time, we will see that it is not a simple concept at all. In any subsequent possible definition with regards to concepts such time for education or time for ethics, a logical clarification of what time is important and will color all further predication of the concept of time. Considering the impact of digital transformation in our lives in general, and in education in particular, a philosophy of time brings major elements such as paradoxes, which are not of practical character but important for the semantic of the words, such as “duration”, “temporal position” of events, etc. (shrink)

One of the theories that have been produced in linguistics in the light of J. E. McTaggart’s influential essay “The Unreality of Time” (1908) is a critique of reality that may be attributed to the semantics of tenses in natural languages. This chapter from my book The Linguistic Picture of the World: Alice’s Adventures in Many Languages proposes an alternative approach to the semantics of time, not as a dubious product of linguists’ imagination, i.e. not as something that can (...) easily be discarded from the philosophy of language but rather as a firm category of human thinking. Particular emphasis is placed on the idea of time as it is expressed by the seemingly rather contradictory morphology of the past, present, and future. (shrink)