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The Unreality of Time
McTaggart and Prior
“I believe that time is unreal.’ But I do so for reasons which are not, I think, employed by any of the philosophers whom I have mentioned, and I propose to explain my reasons in this paper,” (Mctaggart 1908, 457)
Most everyone accept that time is real. McTaggart famously took up this assumption, and declared time to not be real, because it depends on what is known as the A series of time. Let us now turn to this problem.
Each position in time is either past, present, or future. Distinctions of the past are take to be permanent, while distinctions of the future are not. Distinctions of the past may be taken as more essential and fundamental, or “objective” than distinctions of the future. McTaggart claims this is a mistake because past, present, and future is as essential to time as earlier and later, and perhaps more fundamental and unavoidable for the reality of time. To see this we should first turn to the series:
A series: FP<-NP<-PR->NF->FF Events are past, present, or future OR;
B series: T1->T2->T3->T4-F->T5 Events are earlier or later OR;
C series: L M N O P Events are ordered but non-directional.
For the reality of time, which is correct? For B series, all events are rendered permanent, and events can’t properly…
