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The Unreality of Time
The Unreality of Time is the best-known philosophical work of the Cambridge idealist J. M. E. McTaggart. In the paper, first published in 1908 in Mind 17: 457-73, McTaggart argues that time is unreal.
McTaggart acknowledges that events seem to be ordered in time, and that the passage of time can be understood in terms of events moving from the future to the present to the past. He then sets out to demonstrate the unreality of time by discussing two conceptions of time:
- A: Events find their ordering in time by virtue of instantiating different temporal properties at different times.
- B: Events bear an unchanging (static) temporal relation to all other events (e.g. if event M is earlier than event N at any time, it will always be earlier than N.)
McTaggart sets out to demonstrate that time is an illusion. He first argues that (B) alone will not guarantee the passage of time. He then argues that (A) (and its combination with (B)) lead to contradiction. McTaggart said any attempt to avoid this contradiction leads to an infinite regress. He concludes that time is not a real part of the physical universe.
Source: Wikipedia - The Unreality of Time