John McTaggart (3 September 1866 - 18 January 1925) was an idealist metaphysician. For most of his life McTaggart was a fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an exponent of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and among the most notable of the British idealists. J. M. E. McTaggart was born in 1866 in London to Francis and Ellen Ellis. At birth, he was named John McTaggart Ellis, after his maternal grand-uncle, John McTaggart. Early in his life, his family took the surname McTaggart as a condition of inheritance from that same uncle.
McTaggart attended Clifton College, Bristol, before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1885. At Trinity he was taught for the Moral Sciences Tripos by Henry Sidgwick and James Ward, both distinguished philosophers. After obtaining First class honours (the only student of Moral Sciences to do so in 1888), he was, in 1891, elected to a prize fellowship at Trinity on the basis of a dissertation on Hegel's Logic. McTaggart had in the meantime been President of the Union Society, a debating club, and the secretive Cambridge Apostles. In 1897 he was appointed to a college lectureship in Philosophy, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1923 (although he continued to lecture until his death).
McTaggart, although radical in his youth, became increasingly conservative and was influential in the expulsion of Bertrand Russell from Trinity for pacifism during World War I. But McTaggart was a man of contradictions: despite his conservatism he was an advocate of women's suffrage; and though an atheist from his youth was a firm believer in human immortality and a defender of the Church of England. He was personally charming and had interests ranging beyond philosophy, known for his encyclopaedic knowledge of English novels and eighteenth-century memoirs.
His honours included an honorary LLD from the University of St. Andrews and Fellowship of the British Academy.
He died in London in 1925. In 1899 he had married Margaret Elizabeth Bird in New Zealand whom he met while visiting his mother (then living in near New Plymouth, Taranaki) and was survived by her; the couple had no children. McTaggart's earlier work was devoted to an exposition and critique of Hegel's metaphysical methods and conclusions and their application in other fields. His first published work Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (1896), an expanded version of his Trinity fellowship dissertation, focused on the dialectical method of Hegel's Logic. His second work Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901) is directed more towards a critique of the applications of Hegelian ideas made, both by Hegel and earlier neo-Hegelians, to the fields of ethics, politics and religion. In this book a number of his distinctive doctrines already appear, for example, his belief in human immortality. His final book specifically on Hegel was A Commentary on Hegel's "Logic" (1910), in which he attempted to explain and, to an extent, defend the argument of the Logic.
Although he defended the dialectical method broadly construed and shared a similar outlook to Hegel, McTaggart's Hegelianism was not uncritical and he disagreed significantly both with Hegel himself and with earlier neo-Hegelians. He believed that many specific features of Hegel's argument were gravely flawed and was similarly disparaging of Hegel's application of his abstract thought. However, he by no means reached the same conclusions as the previous generations of British Idealists and in his later work came to hold strikingly different and original views. Nonetheless, in spite of his break from earlier forms of Hegelianism, McTaggart inherited from his predecessors a pivotal belief in the ability of a priori thought to grasp the nature of the ultimate reality, which for him like earlier Hegelians was the absolute idea. Indeed, his later work and mature system can be seen as largely an attempt to give substance to his new conception of the absolute. In The Unreality of Time (1908), the work for which he is best known today, McTaggart argued that our perception of time is an illusion, and that time itself is merely ideal. He introduced the notions of the "A series" and "B series" interpretations of time, representing two different ways that events in time can be arranged. The A series corresponds to our everyday notions of past, present, and future. The A series is "the series of positions running from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present to the near future and the far future" (p. 458). This is contrasted with the B series, in which positions are ordered from earlier to later, i.e. the series running from earlier to later moments.
McTaggart argued that the A series was a necessary component of any full theory of time, but that it was also self-contradictory and that our perception of time was, therefore, ultimately an incoherent illusion. McTaggart was a friend and teacher of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, and, according to Martin Gardner, the three were known as "The Mad Tea-Party of Trinity" (with McTaggart as the Dormouse). Along with Russell and Moore McTaggart was a member of the Cambridge Apostles through which he would have a personal influence on an entire generation of writers and politicians (his involvement with the Apostles presumably overlapped with that of, among others, the members of the Bloomsbury group) .
In particular, McTaggart was an early influence on Bertrand Russell. It was through McTaggart that the young Russell was converted to the prevalent Hegelianism of the day, and it was Russell's reaction against this Hegelianism that began the arc of his later work.
McTaggart was the most influential advocate of neo-Hegelian idealism in Cambridge at the time of Russell and Moore's reaction against it, as well as being a teacher and personal acquaintance of both men. With F.H. Bradley of Oxford he was, as the most prominent of the surviving British Idealists, the primary target of the new realists' assault. McTaggart's indirect influence was, therefore, very great. Given that modern analytic philosophy can arguably be traced to the work of Russell and Moore in this period, McTaggart's work retains interest to the historian of analytic philosophy despite being, in a very real sense, the product of an earlier age.
The Nature of Existence, with Green's Prolegomena to Ethics and Bradley's Appearance and Reality, marks the greatest achievement of British Idealism, and McTaggart was the last major British Idealists of the classic period (for the later development of British Idealism, see T.L.S. Sprigge).
