Audiobook · read by volunteers
Unreality of Time
John McTaggart (1866–1925)
Read by Carl Manchester · 1 chapter · 49 min
About the book
Is time real? In 1908 the British philosopher John McTaggart published an essay in the journal Mind arguing that it is not. His case is built carefully, step by step, around a distinction that has fascinated philosophers ever since. We may speak of events as past, present and future, or we may speak of them simply as earlier or later than one another. McTaggart called the first way the A series and the second the B series, and he argued that the A series is essential to time yet impossible to make coherent. The conclusion sounds absurd, but the reasoning is hard to dismiss. Carl Manchester reads this compact classic in under an hour, an invitation to think slowly about something we normally take for granted.
Introduction
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925) was a British philosopher who spent much of his career at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an idealist in the tradition of Hegel, convinced that reality is ultimately spiritual in nature, and he worked out his views in a series of dense, closely argued books. Of all his writings, however, the essay on the unreality of time is the one that has had the longest afterlife.
It was published in 1908 in Mind, one of the leading journals of philosophy. McTaggart distinguished two ways of ordering events: the A series, in which events are past, present or future, and the B series, in which they are simply earlier or later than others. The terms he introduced have remained the standard vocabulary in the philosophy of time, and his argument is still discussed by those who defend or attack each view. He also spoke of a C series, an order that is not itself temporal.
The recording is a single section and runs for about fifty minutes. It is read by a LibriVox volunteer, Carl Manchester. The argument is demanding, but it is clear in structure and rewards careful attention. For listeners with an interest in metaphysics it is a classic text, and for anyone else it offers a short and surprising introduction to what philosophers mean when they say that something we experience constantly may not be quite what it seems.
Public domain
John McTaggart died in 1925: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text