John McTaggart - Icon Profile | Alexandria
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925) was a British metaphysician and philosopher who profoundly influenced 20th-century discussions of time, idealism, and the nature of reality. Best known for his argument against the reality of time, McTaggart exemplified the last great flowering of British Idealism before its eclipse by analytic philosophy. His double-barreled surname, adopted to satisfy inheritance requirements, hints at the duality that would characterize his philosophical work.
First emerging in academic circles at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under Henry Sidgwick and James Ward, McTaggart developed his philosophical ideas during a period of intense intellectual ferment in British higher education. His 1896 publication "Studies in Hegelian Dialectic" marked him as a significant interpreter of Hegel, though his interpretation would prove uniquely personal and ultimately divergent from orthodox Hegelianism.
McTaggart's most enduring contribution to philosophy came in his 1908 paper "The Unreality of Time," later expanded in his masterwork "The Nature of Existence" (1921-1927). Here, he introduced his famous A-series and B-series of time, arguing that our common understanding of temporal passage (the A-series) is fundamentally contradictory, while the B-series of "earlier than" and "later than" relations, though coherent, cannot alone constitute time as we experience it. This paradoxical conclusion - that time is both necessary for our experience yet ultimately unreal - continues to provoke philosophical debate.
McTaggart's legacy extends beyond his temporal theories. His mystical personalism, which held that reality consists ultimately of immortal spirits bound together by love, seems at odds with his rigorous logical argumentation, yet this tension exemplifies the broader struggle between rationalism and romanticism in modern philosophy. Contemporary philosophers still grapple with his arguments about time, while his views on personal identity and the nature of existence continue to inspire new interpretations and debates. In an era increasingly concerned with the nature of time and consciousness, McTaggart's work remains surprisingly relevant, asking us to question our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality and our experience of it.