John McTaggart in his essay “Time” presents a radical argument that claims time is unreal. While the argument is interesting and has attracted much attention for his arguments, I remain unconvinced of the argument he makes. This paper will lay out McTaggart’s argument that time in unreal, critically analyze why I believe McTaggart’s argument fails and present an alternative idea about time, utilizing aspects of McTaggart’s argument.
Here is an explanation of McTaggart’s view. McTaggart wants ultimately to prove that time does not exist. He attempts to do this by arguing time’s existence is contingent on the existence of transient time and that ultimately transient time fails. Transient time involves A-series. A-series are attributed temporal properties; that is, that they involve “tensed statements.” i.e. past, present and future. He presents a series of arguments that attempt to build on each other to prove time is unreal.
McTaggart splits his paper in two sections. He spends the first part of the paper attempting to prove that time can only exist if A-series exist.
“ We perceive events in time as being present, and those are the only events which we actually perceive. And all other events which, by memory or by inference, we believe to be real, we regard as present, past, or future. Thus the events of time are observed by us form an A-series.”
He proves the necessity of A-series by dismissing B-series. B-series involves earlier and later statements that remain frozen in time. For example, my mother is born before I am born. The statement does not involve tenses; it simply states that there is an event. It does not involve change. B-series serves Static time in this sense.
McTaggart states that it is “universall...
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...change proves the existence of A-series, then time exists. (i,ii,iii)
Time is a difficult topic to handle in metaphysics; many problems arise. If you support A-series, which involves change, you are left to wonder the rate at which time passes. I cannot put my support behind static time; time appears to pass and in passing change occurs. The only aspect of time that appears to stay frozen are events in the past. However, events have to change from future to present and then to past before they can become static in the past. Even though there are clear objections to theories about time, I cannot support McTaggart’s bold claim that time is unreal. I can only look at time from my perspective. Ultimately there is so much change that occurs in me and around me as time passes that I cannot view time to be unreal and I am left to disregard McTaggart’s argument.
In the appendix to Person and Object, Roderick Chisholm discusses the doctrine of temporal parts. Chisholm’s position is that the arguments commonly supplied in support of the doctrine are not successful. In this paper, I will consider Chisholm’s objections and then give my own responses in favor of the doctrine of temporal parts.
If you have ever read Einstein's Dreams, you can appreciate my dilemma. If you have not yet had the opportunity to experience this wonderful novel by Alan Lightman, I guarantee that after you read it you will expand your perception of the nature of time and of human activity. The novel is enchanting. It is a fictional account of what one of the greatest scientific minds dreams as he begins to uncover his theory of relativity.
Musser, George. Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other
...arly. When he entered the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, he and his dog Kazak were converted to wave phenomena, which resulted in an existence that spanned space as well as time. Essentially, he was forced to adopt a Simultaneous perspective. What makes Rumfoord’s case particularly compelling is that he is capable of materializing and interacting with other beings. These beings do not share his Simultaneous outlook. In order to communicate coherently with them, he must adapt his knowledge and experience to a Sequential mindset or “punctual way of speaking” as Rumfoord refers to it (20). Interestingly, Rumfoord’s description of time bears a striking resemblance to Shevek’s book comparison. He links the experience of time to a roller coaster. He can see the shape of it, “every dip and turn,” but the rider must still, ultimately, get on and take the ride (54).
McTaggart thinks he has found a problem with the idea of time which is that the existence of time in itself is a contradiction and he argues that appearances of temporal order are just appearances. In his Argument he has two parts the first part is that time revolves around change and he introduces A- series, and the second part of the argument is that A- series is contradictory and leads to an infinite regress and that B- series Alone Does not account for change. To McTaggart it seems that if we accept that A-series Exists it would eventually lead us to a contradiction and that there can be no time without A-series and this is the reason why McTaggart concludes that time is unreal.
Specifically, he elaborates that “We might compare time to a constantly revolving sphere; the half that was always sinking would be the past, that which was always rising would be the future; but the indivisible point at the tip, where the tangent touches, would be the extensionless present” (“A New Refutation of Time”, 289). This being the case, however, he elaborates in the final paragraph that “denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations…Time is the substance I am made of…The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges” (“A New Refutation of Time”, 290). In essence, Borges, despite his refutation, accepts his role in a universe that is irrevocably tethered to a concept of time that moves in a solely linear fashion. According to Donnelly, “Borges has simultaneously established that time is not temporally successive, and that temporal succession is not unreal (and therefore time is not not temporally successive)” (77). In conclusion, Borges present multiple opinions on the facets of time, including the idea that it is non-linear in
This points to the subject of being and time. Being and time is demonstrated when Heidegger defined Dasein as the concrete description of man’s being-there in the temporal world. Because we exist in time, at the instant moment we are neither in the past or future we are what we are not. According the the book titled Existence and Being by Martin Heidegger demonstrates a good example of this by stating “at the same time it is obscure and undefinable; “Being” cannot be comprehend as anything that is; it cannot be deduced from any higher concepts and it cannot be represented by any lower ones; “Being” is not something like a being, a stone, a plant, a table, a man. Yet “Being” seems somehow an evident concept. We make use of it in all knowledge, in all our statements, in all our behavior towards anything that “is”, in our attitude towards ourselves. We are used to living in an “understanding of Being”, but hand in hand with it goes the incomprehensibility of what is meant by
When Brenda Shaughnessy explains her struggle of time being uncontrollable in her poem, Kurt Vonnegut shares his ideas on the way humans perceive time while Billy is living on Tralfamadore this leads to both authors stressing the idea that staying in the moment and enjoying the season of life you are living in is the most important. Time controls most things that humans do, and discussing time through pieces of literature helps people realize how time is the ultimate controller over their lives. Humans seem to think that it's possible to beat or freeze time, but in reality time will neither slow down or speed up. Brenda Shaughnessy stresses throughout her poem, "I have a time machine," that the ability to slow down or speed up time is impossible
This is inconsistent with the fact that each of those differences reject the statement about time. He admits to this contradiction defending that any attempt to explain why there are difference in time is strictly due to the fact that we need to detail the order in which those events occurred (past, present, or future). The description of the “different times” raises the purpose of the past, present, or future and in turn will lead to a “vicious infinite regress” (Christensen, 1974). The vicious infinite regress is invoked because in order to explain why the alternative appeal to the differences in time, doesn’t go through that effort again, we must first be able to explain why each apply consecutively and then explain why that sequence appeals to the differences in time, which has no end to clarification. In McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence he explains how he no longer goes against the circulatory doubts, which is arguable in itself because he has come begin to treat the differences in tenses as unpretentious and inexpressible concepts, arguing that the tenses don’t need to be explained at all. McTaggart now claims that despite his inability to describe what the time differences mean, we can now apply them without additional scrutiny. This still leads to
Time is and endless phenomenon that has no beginning or end, therefore making it infinite. Emily Dickinson proves this point in her poem, Forever – is Composed of Nows, referring to “nows” as more significant than the future (Wilbur 80).
It rushes by before you notice; it sneaks up behind you without uttering a word. Past, present, future. Rahel once believed that whatever number she wrote on her toy watch would be true; “Rahel’s toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place)” (37). Roy wrote The God of Small Things in a nonlinear fashion; time jumps around and goes from the perspective of Rahel as a 7-year-old to 20 years later in a matter of a sentence. Likewise, time changes form, there isn’t really a past, present, and future, it’s all within the life of the twins, it flows together as waves, as ripples, the same concept just in different appearances.
In this essay we will consider a much more recent approach to time that came to the fore in the twentieth century. In 1908 James McTaggart published an article in Mind entitled 'The Unreality of Time', in which, as the title implies, he argued that there is in reality no such thing as time. Now although this claim was in itself startling, probably what was even more significant than McTaggart's arguments was his way of stating them. It was in this paper that McTaggart first drew his now standard distinction between two ways of saying when things happen. In this essay we shall outline these ways of describing events and then discuss the merits and demerits of each, and examine what has become known as the 'tensed versus tenseless' debate on temporal becoming.
...wo side by side the endurantist theories, and our intuition, never better Lewis’s third solution of the doctrine of temporal parts. The endurantist solutions are all far more weak and primitive than Lewis’s. Lewis deems the endurantist position as metaphysically untenable and his own as philosophically sound because of his side note of the need to accept temporal parts into the reader’s ontology.
Time is defined in the dictionary as “the indefinite continued progress of existence”. Einstein is credited with time being referred to as the fourth dimension when in terms of science. Ever since the first humans lived to now, time has always been an important part to life. We began to classify time and name certain sections of time by the length of how much time it has taken. These different sections are words that we hear almost daily, such as days, months, and years. The words are then used to clearly understand the span of a li...
Albert Einstein once said that, "Time is an illusion". Many people interpret that figuratively and end up thinking that he means the time is what you make of it or a different philosophical concept of time, but Einstein meant it quite literally. Einstein meant that time as we know it is not real. There are many reasons why time is not real and some of these include the fundamental properties of time, the relativity of time, how time is determined on a universal scale, and how time is used.