Table Of ContentMcTaggart’s Paradox
McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time—first published 1908—set
the agenda for 20th-century philosophy of time. Yet there is no agreement
on what it actually says—nobody agrees with the conclusion, but still every-
body finds something important in it. This book presents the first critical
overview of a century of debate on what has become known as “McTaggart’s
Paradox”. Scholars have assumed that the argument does not rely on any
contentious ontological principles. The author demonstrates that this is
incorrect—McTaggart himself insisted that it depends on a number of a pri-
ori principles. Indeed, it appears incomplete without them. Commentators,
in finding it incomplete, have proceeded to understand the argument on the
basis of their own metaphysical assumptions, duly arriving at very differ-
ent interpretations. This book offers an alternative reading of McTaggart’s
Paradox and, at the same time, explains why other commentators arrive at
their mutually incompatible interpretations. The book also draws out the
implications of this alternative reading for the contemporary debate about
the A and B views of time. This book should be of interest to students and
scholars with an interest in the philosophy of time and other areas of con-
temporary metaphysics.
R. D. Ingthorsson is a Lecturer at Lund University, Sweden. He has pub-
lished in T he European Journal of Philosophy , Dialectica , Metaphysica , and
Axiomathes, and co-edited the celebrated M ental Causation and Ontology.
His next project is “Scientific Essentialism: Modernising the Aristotelian
View”, funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenial Foundation.
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84 McTaggart’s Paradox
R. D. Ingthorsson
McTaggart’s Paradox
R. D. Ingthorsson
First published 2016
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ingthorsson, Rèognvaldur D., author.
Title: McTaggart’s paradox / by R.D. Ingthorsson.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2016. |
Series: Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 84 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016006270 | ISBN 9781138677241
(hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis,
1866–1925. | Time.
Classification: LCC B1647.M154 I54 2016 | DDC 115.092—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016006270
ISBN: 978-1-138-67724-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-55963-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Preface ix
About the Method of the Project ix
A Comment on the Content and Form of this Book xi
Acknowledgements xiii
1 The Introduction 1
Origins and Initial Reception 2
The Development of the Debate 3
Is the Argument Worth All the Attention? 5
The Overlooked Pre-History 7
2 The Metaphysics 8
McTaggart’s Approach to Metaphysics 10
The Importance of Appearance 11
The Structure of The Nature of Existence 12
The General Nature of the Existent in Absolute Reality 15
McTaggart’s Metaphysics in Axiomatic Form 17
McTaggart on Persistence 20
Time as an Existing Whole: A Block Universe 22
Substances, Things, and Events as Compound Entities 24
The Relation between Absolute Reality and Our Beliefs
about It 27
The Universe Is a Compound Substance, but Can It
Be Temporal? 29
3 The Argument 30
The Preamble 30
The Appearance of Time 30
Elaboration I: The Ontological Status of Series
and Positions 33
vi Contents
No B Series without an A Series 35
“Events Don’t Change, Things Do” 38
Elaboration II: Change and Truth 40
A Return to “No B Series without an A Series” 42
The Contradictory Nature of the A Series 43
Reprise: The Contradiction 49
McTaggart’s Criticism of Broad’s Theory of Time 50
Does Experience Support the Reality of Time with
Immediate Certainty? 52
Even If Experience of Time Is Illusory, Not Everything
in It Is Illusory 52
McTaggart Is Closer to Hegel than Kant, and not
Unlike Russell 53
4 The C Series 54
Error 55
Time and Error 57
The Nature of the C Series 58
5 The Defenses 60
The General Attitude 60
The Defense of the Contradiction 61
McTaggart and the Token-Reflexivity of Propositions 63
The Defenders on the Ontological Status of Future
and Past 66
The Core of the Dispute 67
Must There Be a Complete Description? 68
Complete Description from No-When or Every-When? 71
A Circular Rather than Infinite Regress? 73
Conclusion 76
6 The Objections 78
No Contradiction because Tense is Subjective 79
There Is No Appearance of Contradiction 81
McTaggart Misunderstands the Semantics of Tensed
Language 87
“Events Don’t Change, Things Do” 90
7 The B View and the Problem of Change 92
The Link between Change, Persistence, and Time 94
The Problem of Temporary Intrinsics 96
Contents vii
The Spatial Analogue Argument 99
‘Wholly Present’, ‘Singly Located’, vs. ‘Multiply Located’ 100
Mellor’s Solution 103
Simons’s Theory of Invariants 108
Properties as Relations to Times 110
Conclusion 111
8 The A View and the Problem of Tense 112
Realism about the Future, Present, and Past I:
A - B Hybrids 113
Interlude: Cameron’s Moving Spotlight Theory 117
Realism about the Future, Present, and Past II:
Fragmentalism 120
The Branching View of Tense 122
Rejecting the Future: The Growing Block 123
Presentism 128
Ersatz Presentism 134
Problem of Cross-Time Relations 135
New Directions for Presentism? 136
The Problem of Tense 139
9 The Conclusion 140
Bibliography 143
Index 151
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Preface
The writing of this book was made possible by a grant from the S wedish
Research Council, which allowed me three years of nearly full-time study
of everything ever written in English about McTaggart’s infamous argument
for the unreality of time. Well, I say ‘everything’, but in reality I can claim
only to have read everything one can hope to find with a reasonable effort,
given how poorly indexed philosophical literature is. I have searched with all
the search engines I could think of, with the broadest search terms that make
any sense at all, and manually searched through the references of every work
I came across. Still, I strongly suspect I didn’t find everything.
This is not the first time I address McTaggart’s argument for the unreality
of time. Indeed, the argument has been on my mind for nearly 20 years. It
was the first focal point of my Ph.D. project and resulted in the publication
of two journal articles (Ingthorsson 1998, 2001), which later became Chap-
ter 2 and 3 of my thesis (Ingthorsson 2002 b ). I have presented my views on
McTaggart at the Wittgenstein Symposium (Ingthorsson 1999) and at various
conferences and research seminars around the world: Gothenburg in 2001,
Durham in 2008, Reykjavík in 2008, Lund in 2012, and Istanbul in 2013.
As a Ph.D., I focused on McTaggart’s own writings, mainly because I found
the secondary literature on the argument to be conflicting beyond intelligibil-
ity, both with respect to each other and with my understanding of McTaggart.
In other words, I felt a growing understanding of McTaggart’s philosophy
and the argument for the unreality of time, but not of the literature pro-
voked by his argument. Fourteen years later, I was beginning to glimpse an
understanding for the secondary literature, similar to the one I previously felt
about McTaggart. I then devised a plan about how to approach the literature
in order to sort out the remaining questions I was still struggling with. This
plan was received well by the S wedish Research Council , which awarded me
the funds to carry it through. For this I am exceedingly grateful.
About the Method of the Project
The method applied in this project merits a brief comment because it is not
often applied in philosophy, as far as I can tell, and it is relevant for the
