Emily Thomas writes:

Events happen in order – you whisk icing before decorating a cake. Some events seem to be present, while others are future or past. A birthday party lies in the future, approaching slowly. When the big day arrives, the party is present; afterwards, it slips into memory and the past. Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they really? Philosophers disagree, and this debate pervades books such as Time and Space (2001) by Barry Dainton, and A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (2013), edited by Adrian Bardon and Heather Dyke.

How did this disagreement come about? Although it sounds like the sort of thing that philosophers have wrangled over for millennia, I say it’s relatively recent. I think the debate was started just over 100 years ago, by one man: John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart.

McTaggart was a Cambridge philosopher, working in Trinity College through the turn of the 20th century. Of their first meeting, Bertrand Russell wrote that he was ‘even shyer than I was’: McTaggart was too shy to enter Russell’s room, and Russell too shy to ask him in. Russell and McTaggart were part of the ‘Mad Tea Party of Trinity’: Russell the Mad Hatter, and McTaggart with his ‘innocent, sleepy air’ the Dormouse. Despite his gentleness, McTaggart was ingenious. A colleague observed that McTaggart ‘added greatly to the gaiety of college meetings’, for he was liable to use arguments that ‘everyone accepted, to support conclusions which no one else had thought of’.

From his earliest work, McTaggart obsessed over time. In itself, this was not unusual – during this period, many philosophers were similarly absorbed. What was unusual is how McTaggart thought about time. [Continue reading…]