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The Positive McTaggart on Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

John King-Farlow
John King-Farlow
Affiliation:
Universities of Alberta and Ottawa
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Extract

It is increasingly fashionable to attack McTaggart's arguments about the Unreality of Time with a minimum of attention to what he was trying to establish. Those who have only read his one still famous paper ‘The Unreality of Time’ [III] are too likely to assume from professional philosophers' current counter-arguments that the man was a sceptic with only a single (negative) idea in his head, rather than an ingenious, constructive metaphysician. Since so much formal and informal analysis has been directed against so few of McTaggart's comments on Time, and mainly against his destructive claim that the vulgar concept of Time requires as explicans an incoherent ‘A-series’ of becomings with ever-shifted pasts, presents and futures, perhaps it is time to encourage some redirection of analytical assessment to what he was arguing for. I say this not only for historical reasons, though I shall draw historical comparisons, but because rationally assessing what McTaggart really denies about Time may require some serious interest in what he so interestingly asserts about our experience of what we call ‘Time’. Trousers, pace Austin, normally have one wearer but two legs. If McTaggart's negative points deserve such a plethora of analysis, then the positive view needs attention or the analysis is ill-aimed.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 49 , Issue 188 , April 1974 , pp. 169 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1974

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References

1 See Smart, Ninian's Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy (London, 1964) p. 24Google Scholar; compare his discussion of the Sánkara metaphysicians and their interpretations of ‘reality underlying appearances’ at p. 98 and passim.

2 For many useful citations of Hans Reichenbach's and Adolf Grünbaum's work on Time see Gale [I] and [II].

3 See McTaggart, [VIII] Books IV, VI, VII.Google Scholar

4 See Wisdom, John's remarks on Patterns in ‘Gods’, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Oxford, 1953)Google Scholar. Cf. Chapter IV, ‘Patterns’, of Bambrough, Hertford's Reason, Truth and God (London, 1969)Google Scholar. ‘Gods’ is a classic essay from which philosophers of Time and historians of all philosophy still have much to learn. Wisdom also discusses the related notion of Picture Preferences. For some observations on Time, Truth and Picture Preferences see my ‘Seafights without Tears’, Analysis, 1958Google Scholar; ‘Mr. Bradley and the Libertarians’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1959Google Scholar; ‘Three Questions for Prior on Time’, A.J.P., 1961Google Scholar; ‘Truth Preference and Neuter Propositions’, Philosophy of Science, 1963.Google Scholar

5 See McTaggart, [VII] pp. 116–118Google Scholar for the C-Series, also page 85 for important remarks on his view of substances, with a very helpful clarifying footnote by the editor, S. V. Keeling. McTaggart is in sad part responsible for misleading Gale and others about his views on the C-Series and the possibility of non-temporal directedness, as I hope the closing part of this paper will make clear.

6 Compare McTaggart, [VII] pp. 116–117, 131, 154, 155Google Scholar; McTaggart, [VIII] Volume II, Book VI, Chapters xlv–1, and Book VII, Chapters lxiv–lxviii.Google Scholar

7 Compare Williams, Donald C.' ‘The Myth of Passage’, a (would-be) B-Theor-ist's classic on ‘the four-dimensional fabric of juxtaposed actualities’Google Scholar. The paper is reproduced in Gale, [II] pp. 98–118Google Scholar. Williams is reinforced at Gale, [II] pp. 322–353Google Scholar by Grünbaum, Adolf's ‘The Status of Temporal Becoming’.Google Scholar

8 For interesting historical comments and valuable listings on the ‘B-theory Answer’ to McTaggart see Gale, [II] pp. 69–77 and 496–502Google Scholar. For ‘A-theorists’ compare pp. 71–83 and 497–498.Google Scholar

9 Although he mentions Parmenides briefly in his exciting recent paper ‘On What There Is Not’, (Review of Metaphysics, 1972)Google Scholar, Gale does not draw any suitable morals about possible historical misrepresentation of Eleatic ‘mystics’ in his own books on Time.

10 Compare Gale, who apparently ascribes this view to McTaggart, at The Language of Time [I], pp. 25–26Google Scholar when he writes: ‘A linear spatial order has a direction only in reference to the right and left hands of an external observer; thus the direction is extrinsic to the order itself.

11 I am indebted to Dr William René Shea for discussing these and related problems about philosophy of Time and philosophy of Physics with me, and hence for helping me to broaden my initial perspective on McTaggart.