In 1908 J. M. E. McTaggart published a paper in *Mind* titled "The Unreality of Time." The argument is short, the conclusion is shocking, and the influence has been deep. Time, McTaggart claims, is unreal. The paper became one of the most cited works in twentieth-century philosophy of time, with well over a century of subsequent literature responding to it. If McTaggart was right, the present account of [§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>) has, in its first condition, named something unreal, and the bidirectional identity collapses on the temporal side.

The argument is concise enough to state in a paragraph. McTaggart distinguishes two ways of describing temporal events: the A-series (past, present, future, with the present moving) and the B-series (earlier than, simultaneous with, later than, fixed across the manifold). Time, McTaggart argues, requires the A-series: without becoming, there is no genuine temporality, only a static array of events with relations of earlier and later. But the A-series is contradictory. Every event is past, present, and future (these properties are mutually incompatible) and any attempt to remove the contradiction by relativizing (event E is future relative to time t1, present relative to t2, past relative to t3) generates a regress: the relativizing times are themselves events, each of which is past, present, and future, and so on. The A-series is incoherent; the B-series alone is insufficient for time; therefore time is unreal.

The argument has divided the philosophy of time ever since. Broad's *An Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy* (-(Broad, C. D., 1938)) gives the first sustained reply, defending A-series becoming against the contradiction charge; the moving-spotlight theory (the view that a four-dimensional manifold of events is timelessly arrayed and a privileged 'now' moves across it) is the image Broad had earlier introduced in *Scientific Thought* (1923) only to reject it. Prior's *Past, Present, and Future* (-(Prior, A. N., 1967)) develops tense logic to formalize A-series claims. Mellor's *Real Time* (-(Mellor, D. H., 1981)) and *Real Time II* (-(Mellor, D. H., 1998)) accept the contradiction in the A-series and develop a B-theoretic alternative on which tensed claims are reduced to tenseless truth-conditions. Tooley's *Time, Tense, and Causation* (-(Tooley, Michael, 1997)) defends a growing-block theory (on which the past and present are real but the future is not, with the block growing by accretion as time passes). Dummett (-(Dummett, Michael, 1960), in *Truth and Other Enigmas*) reads McTaggart as a reductio of the assumption that the description of reality must be perspective-independent. Dainton (*Time and Space*, 2nd ed. -(Dainton, Barry, 2010)) gives the standard survey. The contemporary positions (presentism, eternalism, growing-block, moving spotlight) are largely structured by which side of McTaggart's argument they accept and which side they reject.

The target of the present reply is McTaggart's conclusion: that time is unreal. The A-series/B-series question, at the level it operates within the philosophy of time, is largely orthogonal to the present account. The dispute is already bracketed at the structural level by §[§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>)–2.7: the present account requires temporal ordering of states sufficient to support change, and [§7.2.2](<7.2.2 What is Required.md>) develops the composition view that resolves the dispute by holding A-series passage and B-series dimension together as two features Temporality requires rather than rival specifications of one. The reply here is narrower: McTaggart's argument, granting its details, does not establish what its conclusion claims. It establishes at most a thesis about how to describe time, not a thesis about whether the structural conditions of temporality obtain.

Three forms of the move develop the position at three depths: the strict-unreality form, the A-series-incoherence form, and the perspective-dependence form. Each fails for the same structural reason at increasing levels of refinement.

*First.* The strict-unreality reading: McTaggart's argument shows that time itself is unreal, full stop. There is no time, only the appearance of time, generated by some non-temporal feature of reality. This is the most extreme reading and the one McTaggart himself sometimes seems to endorse.

McTaggart's writing and publication occurred within the apparent temporal order, so the performance of the argument instantiates temporal structure at the act level. The 1908 paper is itself an event with structural conditions: it is distinct from the 1907 draft and from the 1909 reception (S), it stands in temporal relations to those events (T), and it persists as a paper across the century of subsequent commentary (Φ). Its publication in *Mind* presupposes that the paper was first written and then published, not that the writing and the publication are non-temporally co-present in some atemporal mode. What that establishes is narrower than the date 1908 might suggest: the argument cannot dispense with temporal representation in its articulation. It does not by itself refute an error theory on which the apparent order is grounded in non-temporal reality. The object-side account must be tested separately, and the burden it carries is to explain the indispensable structure without real time.

The deeper structural point: the A-series/B-series dispute is internal to the analysis of T. If one of the two series is incoherent, then T must be analyzed in terms of the other series, or in terms of some third structure. McTaggart's own C-series (the permanent, direction-neutral ordering of positions that survives the A-series' collapse) is one such third structure, and the structural account partially vindicates it: the C-series' bare ordering is real, the genuine residue of McTaggart's positive view. What the structural T-role adds is precisely what the C-series withholds (asymmetric direction) supplied not by the contradictory A-series but by the self-exclusion the account grounds independently. So the affinity is the ordering and the difference is the asymmetry: the account preserves McTaggart's positive residue while supplying the direction his negative argument leaves ungrounded. What the dispute does not show is that T fails to obtain. The structural condition T (directed ordering of states) is satisfied by either an A-series tensed analysis or a B-series tenseless analysis or some combination, and the choice between them is the topic of the philosophy of time, not a refutation of the existence of T.

*Second.* The A-series-incoherence form is the more defensible reading. McTaggart's argument shows only that the A-series is incoherent, and a B-theoretic analysis of time is the proper response: time consists in the B-series, and the apparent reality of becoming is to be explained as a perspectival or psychological feature rather than as a metaphysical fact. Mellor's *Real Time II* develops this position with full rigor.

The retorsion-from-1908 above closes the strict-unreality reading only; the serious B-theoretic tradition (Mellor, Williams, Sider) operates at this level and is engaged here and at [§4.2.6](<4.2.6 Block Universe.md>). The B-series (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with) supplies the dimension feature of Temporality. The four-dimensional manifold of B-series events is distinguishable into events (S), ordered (T), and persists across the manifold as a unified four-dimensional whole (Φ). On the composition view at [§7.2.2](<7.2.2 What is Required.md>), Temporality requires both the dimension and the passage; the B-theorist who supplies the dimension cleanly and reduces passage to indexical content gives one feature where the composition requires two, and the disagreement lives there. The Mellor reading is one specification of Temporality's dimension feature, not the complete metaphysics of T.

*Third.* The perspective-dependence reading (Dummett, Sider, the early-twentieth-century Cambridge reading) takes McTaggart's argument as showing not that time is unreal but that any complete description of reality must be from no perspective (perspective-independent in the strong sense) and that the A-series, which is irreducibly perspectival, cannot figure in such a description. This is a thesis about the metaphysics of description rather than about the metaphysics of time directly.

The perspective-dependence reading is structurally interesting and partly correct. The A-series claims are perspective-dependent in a sense the B-series claims are not: 'the present moment' picks out different moments depending on when the claim is made; 'earlier than 1908' picks out the same moments regardless of when the claim is made. What the present account requires is that whatever specification of T is offered, the structural fact of directed ordering obtains. Whether the metaphysical description that captures the ordering is perspectival or perspective-independent is a separate question. The B-theorist offers the perspective-independent version; the A-theorist offers the perspectival version; both supply T. McTaggart on the present reading, like Dummett, raises a question about the metaphysics of description; the question is genuinely open, and the present account is consistent with either resolution.

A kindred move is the radical eliminativism (some readings of Parfit, some readings of Buddhist analyses): time is unreal because the relations it requires (between selves, between events, between moments) are themselves unreal. The reply combines the present reply with [§4.2.8](<4.2.8 Stage Theory.md>) (the momentariness reply): the relations are exactly the structural facts [§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>) names, and their elimination either collapses on its own description or relabels the structural facts under another vocabulary.

Another kindred is the McTaggart-via-presentism position: only the present is real, and the past and future are not, so the A-series cannot generate the contradiction because there is only the present moment. Presentism is a metaphysical thesis with its own challenges (the truthmaker problem, the cross-time relations problem, the problem of historical reference); the present account is consistent with presentism in the sense that the structural conditions can be specified at each present moment as a fact about what reality contains. Whether presentism is the right metaphysics of time is a separate question that the present account does not adjudicate.

*What converges.* Three forms clarify the dispute: strict unreality faces an act/object burden because its argument uses temporal representation but may still propose a non-temporal ground of appearance; A-series-incoherence is consistent with the present account, which admits B-theoretic specification of T; and perspective-dependence is a thesis about the metaphysics of description, not about whether T obtains. Across the three forms, McTaggart's argument either fails on its own terms or is consistent with the present account.

Sibling counter-constructions: the B-theoretic block universe is treated separately at [§4.2.6](<4.2.6 Block Universe.md>). The temporary-intrinsics objection, on which apparent change is the difference of intrinsic properties at different times rather than change of a single intrinsic, is [§4.2.7](<4.2.7 The Problem of Temporary Intrinsics.md>). The momentariness objection is [§4.2.8](<4.2.8 Stage Theory.md>).

McTaggart's argument belonged to a broader idealist program, and the natural worry is that the present account's necessary, empirically unencounterable structure is itself a covert idealism rather than a neutral structural claim. The question is taken up directly at [§4.3.5](<4.3.5 Idealism.md>): whatever is taken as fundamental (a cosmic mind included) instantiates T, S, and Φ once it is structured enough to do the work the position needs of it, so the structural conditions are mind-compatible without being mind-derived. The idealist setting is engaged there, not set aside here.

What the McTaggart literature genuinely establishes is worth preserving: the conceptual analysis of time is harder than the pre-analytic vocabulary suggests, and the relation between A-series description and B-series description is one of the deepest structural questions in metaphysics. The present account does not adjudicate that question. It makes a weaker claim: the structural fact of directed ordering obtains, with the A/B dispute resolved by the composition view of [§7.2.2](<7.2.2 What is Required.md>). Hybrid views (growing-block and moving-spotlight) and presentism each carry the structural conditions in different vocabulary, with the metaphysical commitments developed there. McTaggart's contribution to twentieth-century metaphysics is to have sharpened the question of how T is to be specified. The contribution does not extend, on the present analysis, to dissolving T altogether.

The 1908 argument survived its tradition: the British Hegelian idealism that gave it its broader setting was largely abandoned by the 1920s, but the distinction between A-series and B-series became a permanent landmark of analytic philosophy of time. The argument survives because the question it raises is real, even if the conclusion it draws is not. Time is real. Its analysis is hard. McTaggart helped make the analysis harder, and the present account of [§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>) is, on the present reading, one beneficiary of the long literature his paper provoked.


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← [4.2.4 Platonism](<4.2.4 Platonism.md>) | [4.2.6 Block Universe](<4.2.6 Block Universe.md>) →
