Concept
The Unreality of Time
Overview
"The Unreality of Time" is the best-known philosophical work of British idealist J. M. E. McTaggart. In the argument, first published as a journal article in Mind in 1908, McTaggart argues that time is unreal because our descriptions of time are either contradictory, circular, or insufficient. A slightly different version of the argument appeared in 1927 as one of the chapters in the second volume of McTaggart's most well known book, The Nature of Existence.
The argument for the unreality of time is popularly treated as a stand-alone argument that does not depend on any significant metaphysical principles (e.g. as argued by C. D. Broad 1933 and L. O. Mink 1960). R. D. Ingthorsson disputes this, and argues that the argument can only be understood as an attempt to draw out certain consequences of the metaphysical system that McTaggart presents in the first volume of The Nature of Existence.
It is helpful to consider the argument as consisting of three parts. In the first part, McTaggart offers a phenomenological analysis of the appearance of time, in terms of the now famous A-series and B-series. In the second part, he argues that a conception of time as only forming a B-series but not an A-series is an inadequate conception of time because the B-series does not contain any notion of change. The A-series, on the other hand, appears to contain change and is thus more likely to be an adequate conception of time. In the third and final part, he argues that the conception of time forming an A-series is contradictory and thus nothing can be like an A-series. Since the A-series and the B-series exhaust possible conceptions of how reality can be temporal, and neither is adequate, the conclusion McTaggart reaches is that reality is not temporal at all.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The unreality of time is a cardinal doctrine of many metaphysical systems, often nominally based, as already by Parmenides, upon logical arguments, but originally derived, at any rate in the founders of new systems, from the certainty which is born in the moment of mystic insight. As a Persian Sufi poet says: "Past and future are what veil God from our sight. Burn up both of them with fire!
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
States what The Unreality of Time is; opens on The Unreality of Time.
The logical basis of the theory alone belongs to philosophy, and alone will occupy us to-night. The way the problem of continuity enters into philosophy is, broadly speaking, the following: Space and time are treated by mathematicians as consisting of points and instants, but they also have a property, easier to feel than to define, which is called continuity, and is thought by many philosophers to be destroyed when…
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy
States what The Unreality of Time is.
For this proposition is synthetical, and therefore cannot spring out of conceptions alone. It is therefore contained immediately in the intuition and representation of time. 5. The infinity of time signifies nothing more than that every determined quantity of time is possible only through limitations of one time lying at the foundation. Consequently, the original representation, time, must be given as unlimited. But…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what The Unreality of Time is.
Philosophers who discussed The Unreality of Time
Related ideas
- Grammatical tense
- Semantics
- J. M. E. McTaggart
- Arthur Prior
- Temporal logic
- Mind (journal)
- Reality
- J. N. Findlay
- Philosophy of space and time
- Existence
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.