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McTaggart and the Neo-Positive Entropists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

William R. Shea
William R. Shea
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Extract

John King-Farlow's ‘The Positive McTaggart on Time’ (Philosophy, 49, 1974, pp. 169–178) brings out extremely important likenesses between ‘abstract’ metaphysicians and ‘concrete’ philosophers of science. These striking similarities illustrate a perennial human quest for Something More Basic than Time, a quest which characterizes not only mystics who rejoice in contradictions but hard-headed philosophers who submit to the rigours of logic. King-Farlow is largely concerned with the McTaggart of 1908 and his motivation for writing ‘The Unreality of Time’. I should like to explore further the surprising bond between the Search for Something Deeper in the later McTaggart of The Nature of Existence and the writings on Time of Hans Reichenbach and Adolf Grünbaum. Reflection on this similarity should enable us better to evaluate the view that our vulgar, if practically useful, assertions about Time's Arrow must be reinterpreted by the wise in terms of chastened logical constructions out of statements about Something Deeper—logical constructions which are alleged, if chaste enough, to be eliminable.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 193 , July 1975 , pp. 346 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1975

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References

1 McTaggart, J. McT. E., The Nature of Existence, 2 vols. [1921 and 1927] (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar; Reichenbach, Hans, The Direction of Time (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1956)Google Scholar; Grünbaum, Adolf, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1963).Google Scholar

2 For an admirable discussion of Lesniewski's criteria of eliminability and non-creativity for proper definitions, see Suppes', PatrickIntroduction to Logic (O. Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1957), pp. 153–155.Google Scholar

3 McTaggart, , The Nature of Existence, Vol. I, p. 210.Google Scholar

4 McTaggart, , The Nature of Existence, Vol. I, p. 214.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 263.

6 Ibid., p. 479.

7 Reichenbach, , The Direction of Time, pp. 135–143.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., p. 137.

9 Grünbaum, , Philosophical Problems, p. 261.Google Scholar

10 Reichenbach, , The Direction of Time, p. 133.Google Scholar

11 Cf. Huby, Pamela M., ‘Kant or Cantor? That the Universe, if Real, Must be Finite in both Space and Time’, Philosophy 46, 1971, pp. 121–132CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newton-Smith, W. M., ‘Armchair Cosmology’, Philosophy 47, 1972, pp. 64–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boyce, N. W., ‘A Priori Knowledge and Cosmology’Google Scholar, Ibid., pp. 67–70.

12 Grünbaum, , Philosophical Problems, pp. 257–264.Google Scholar