Mctaggart's Argumentative Analysis

Discourse in Favor of the Reality of Time: An Argument against McTaggart’s Unreality of Time In this paper, I will first begin by explaining J. Ellis McTaggart’s argument and reasoning to why he believes that time is unreal , followed by my opinion on his defense of the argument and conclude with a rejection of his premise to prove the reality of time. Before attempting to explain McTaggart’s argument, it is necessary to first establish certain basic concepts that drive his arguments, A series and B series. The A series, as described by McTaggart, is a non-permanent position of an event with the distinction of past, present, or future. The word non-permanent in this case means that one event can have more than one distinction: past, present, or future at different moment; for example, the idea that former President Obama became elected as president at one point was in the future, then it was a specific moment in the present, and now that event is in the past. These moments are relative, non-permanent, because they do not hold all three positions at the same time, it changes. The B series in the other hand is …show more content…
However, I believe that the A series is not necessary in defining what time is and that (real) time can exist based solely on the B series and the C series. In McTaggart’s argument, he proposes that there is a new time series, C series, that he believes could be probable but leaves no room for discussion. The C series says that the realities we perceive as events that form a time-series, namely the A series, do not actually form a temporal series that abides by the temporal distinctions of past, present, and future but instead forms a non-temporal series that says there are a series of events and their direction is unknown, we know only the order of which the events