J. M. E. McTaggart

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart ( born September 3, 1866 in London, † January 18, 1925 ) was an English philosopher.

Biography

His parents were Francis and Caroline Ellis. As a result of an inheritance clause of the maternal great-uncle Sir John McTaggart led the parents the additional surname McTaggart, so that the official name was Ellis McTaggart. Because the son was given the name John McTaggart, there was this full name: John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart ( abbreviated here by McTaggart ).

From 1882 to 1885 McTaggart attended Clifton College in Bristol and from 1885 to 1888 Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1888, he earned a B. A. and 1892 the M. A. Cambridge, where he lectured from 1897 to 1922.

Thinking

McTaggart's essay on the philosophy of time, The Unreality of Time (1908 ), is one of the most influential texts of the entire discipline. He distinguishes there between different ways of viewing the time he A, called B- and C- series. In his view, both the A- and also the B- series are inconsistent or incompatible with the phenomena, from which he concludes that the time had at all an illusion. This conclusion close Although few theorists, his conceptual distinction, however, is still the standard terminology. The A- series operates with terms such as " passed away", "present" and "future", each relative to the first-person perspective of a speaker. The B- series, however, operates with terms such as " earlier than " and " later than ", which thereby are relatively independent of a purely subjective perspective on different time points and.

Effect

McTaggart was a friend and teacher of Bertrand Russell. He brought the philosophy of Hegel in the English-speaking world and is attributed to the neo-Hegelianism and the British idealism.