J. M. E. McTaggart
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John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925) was an Idealist metaphysician of great range, invention, precision, and power. He was the leading Hegel scholar in England at the beginning of the 20th century. He was among the most exact and clearheaded of the British Idealists.
He was a friend and teacher of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, and, according to Martin Gardner, the three were known as "The Mad Tea-Party of Trinity" (with McTaggart as the Dormouse).
McTaggart later developed his own, highly original, metaphysical system. In his two-volume Nature of Existence, the most famous element is his argument for the unreality of time. In a famous paper The Unreality of Time (1908), McTaggart had argued that our perception of time is an illusion, and that time itself is merely ideal. He introduced the notions of the A-series and B-series interpretations of time, representing two different ways that events in time can be arranged. The A-series corresponds to our everyday notions of past, present, and future. An A-series ordering involves statements such as X occurred in the past, X is occurring now, or X will occur in the future. This is contrasted with the B-series, in which events are placed in a chronological order according to relations of the form X occurred before Y, X occurred at the same time as Y, or X occurred after Y.
McTaggart argued that the A-series was a necessary component of any full theory of time, but that it was also self-contradictory and that our perception of time was therefore an ultimately incoherent illusion.
-- 12:32, 18 July 2006 (UTC)Behind Time== See also ==
In the apparently temporal world, everything we think we know is in error. In the true timeless world, the C-series, everything is truly known via a system of loving perception. For an explanation of the C-series, see [Gerald Rochelle], Behind Time.
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