CRITIQUE TO THE UNREALITY OF TIME BY JOHN MC TAGGART

Abstract

John E. McTaggart does not exist, nor is he real. The philosopher mythologized time and asserted that time was unreal. In Greek mythology, Chronos is the king of the titans and the god of impregnable time, which devours everything, including the reality of McTaggart. The philosopher presents two ways of distinguishing positions in time: Series A and B. In Series A, events occur in time with the notions of past, present and future, changing their temporal position and the logical truth value of the propositions that describe the events. Series B, on the other hand, is static and does not allow the change in the truth value of the propositions that
describe the events: previous, posterior or simultaneous. The reality of Series A and B would lead to a contradiction and should be rejected. Nothing changes, nor would it really be past, present and future. Martin Luther King Jr's theistic philosophy rejects the unreality of McTaggart's time. For Dean W. Zimmerman, if it is maintained that God existed in time and was immutable before creation, McTaggart's necessary relationship between time and change would be ruled out ab initio. But for McTaggart, Man (or the soul) is eternal and real. McTaggart's explanatory gap, having unreal time on one side and man's eternity on the other,
is filled by Sāṁkhya (an Indian philosophy), which distinguishes absolute and relative times and spaces.