Instead, it tells us something about our minds. Kant argues that the fact that we cannot dis-imagine time doesn’t tell us anything about the Universe. Even if you destroyed the Universe, time would remain, implying that time exists independently of us. Many absolutists argued that we cannot imagine deleting time from the Universe. He twists an argument made by absolutists. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) put a new spin on time. British interest picked up following the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but this attitude shift took decades to arrive. This was partly due to the Scottish Enlightenment, which discouraged studying abstract, abstruse topics. Major British philosophers of this era ignored time, including Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, George Jardine, Mary Wollstonecraft. Isaac Newton and other absolutists held that time is a kind of being, independent of the created world.īy the mid-18th century, time had slipped off the menu again, especially in Britain. Time became a huge topic from the mid-17th century, when debate raged over ‘absolutism’. Medieval philosophers occasionally puzzled over time, with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas pondering God’s eternity. In Western philosophy, time jumps on and off the menu. Like most human things, philosophy has fashions. What was unusual is how McTaggart thought about time. In itself, this was not unusual – during this period, many philosophers were similarly absorbed. A colleague observed that McTaggart ‘added greatly to the gaiety of college meetings’, for he was liable to use arguments that ‘everyone accepted, to support conclusions which no one else had thought of’.įrom his earliest work, McTaggart obsessed over time.

Despite his gentleness, McTaggart was ingenious. Russell and McTaggart were part of the ‘Mad Tea Party of Trinity’: Russell the Mad Hatter, and McTaggart with his ‘innocent, sleepy air’ the Dormouse. Of their first meeting, Bertrand Russell wrote that he was ‘even shyer than I was’: McTaggart was too shy to enter Russell’s room, and Russell too shy to ask him in. McTaggart was a Cambridge philosopher, working in Trinity College through the turn of the 20th century. I think the debate was started just over 100 years ago, by one man: John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart. How did this disagreement come about? Although it sounds like the sort of thing that philosophers have wrangled over for millennia, I say it’s relatively recent. Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they really? Philosophers disagree, and this debate pervades books such as Time and Space (2001) by Barry Dainton, and A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (2013), edited by Adrian Bardon and Heather Dyke. When the big day arrives, the party is present afterwards, it slips into memory and the past. A birthday party lies in the future, approaching slowly. Some events seem to be present, while others are future or past. Events happen in order – you whisk icing before decorating a cake.

Past and present