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John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925) was an Idealist metaphysician of great range, invention, precision, and power. McTaggart was educated at Clifton College and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained as a lecturer for most of his life. He was the leading Hegel scholar in England at the beginning of the 20th century, and 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 is past, X is present, or X is future. This is contrasted with the B-series, in which events are placed in a chronological order according to relations of the form X is earlier than Y, X is simultaneous with Y, or X is later than 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.
See also The Unreality of Time http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McTaggart_Ellis_McTaggart | ||||||||
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