Questions tagged [mctaggart]
Questions about the life or work of J.M.E. McTaggart, especially his work in the philosophy of time such as his A series and B series.
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The concept of time - arrow, pattern or both?
Time is treated in Relativistic Physics as a pattern of events laid out in a continuum. In philosophy it is usually related to change which physicists partly understand as "time's arrow".
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Time as a transition from a whole which is constitutable by each of many sets of parts to the set of parts that generates the shortest path?
Summary:
Any entity E which is constituted by extrinsically indiscernible parts A and B remains extrinsically the same, in all stages of the change, even if A changes to B and B to A (concurrently).
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What is McTaggart's vicious circle problem with the A series?
In The Unreality of Time (1908), J. Ellis McTaggart identifies a fatal vicious circle in the A series of time. What is the problem? The sun rises every day and ever-finer measurements of time are ...
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Are the A and B theories of time meant to describe actual/ontic/physical reality?
I know this question has been asked many times before but I'm honestly not capable of fully understanding all the many answers that have been given for questions like this. Basically I'm wondering ...
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McTaggart's Unreality of Time
This is going to sound silly but I was wondering why McTaggart's approach is needed to prove time to be real/unreal.
Here's what I was thinking:
The existence of time is a necessary condition for ...
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Does a discussion of McTaggart's B series appear in continental philosophy?
I have thought about it, in my own terms, long enough to think that there's no A series.
But maybe this can inspire me to something more interesting, less analytic.
Do any continental philosophers ...
user6917
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Does McTaggart say "the past that exists now won't always be the past"?
Does McTaggart or anyone say this about the A series? Would it be nonsense to do so?
The past exists now [because now is the end of the past] but no time always exists now: so the past that exists ...
user6917
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Taking now seriously (rather than tense) [closed]
McTaggert says time includes an "irreducible" A series, of the past present and future flowing on like we're used to.
I think he says that the A series cannot exist so time isn't real.
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user6917