A Treatment of McTaggart's Rejection of Time

Abstract

<p> An account of salient conceptions shared among McTaggart's contemporaries is offered to maintain the interpretive hypothesis that McTaggart's rejection of time may be a consequence of a more general metaphysical theory.</p> <p> Yet though McTaggart's rejection of time may follow from a more general account, the more general account may be false. In what follows we consider the possibility of generating complete lists from given wholes, as opposed to the practice of generating wholes by enumeration or induction. Historical support is offered for this scheme, followed by a distillation of McTaggart's doctrines, a brief linkage with mereological treatments of time and geometry, and an exegesis of McTaggart's unique account of change. Finally a treatment of McTaggart's argument for the rejection of time is offered which seeks to show that McTaggart's infamous conclusion has largely been misunderstood because of McTaggart's unfortunate emphasis on the verbal implications of his doctrines and the consequent subversion of his positive account of infinite divisibility, inclusion and the relation between descriptions and wholes.</p>