J. M. E. McTaggart was a revolutionary in his time. He was an idealist who was apparently not awed by accepted thoughts and facts. His most prominent work was ‘The Unreality of Time’ which he first published in MIND. In the article he argues that time is not real since our descriptions of it are either circular, insufficient or contradictory. He splits his description of time into the A- series and B-series (O’Hear, 2001). The A-series is made up of the future, present and past while the B-series is described as earlier than or later than. For example, annual order is in the B-series; 2013 is earlier than 2014. He argued that time can only be real if both series exist and there are changes in the sequence (O’Hear, 2001). He said that the A-series is contradictory since if one condition precludes all the others. According to him all the conditions must exist; the past, future and present. He finds it contradictory that for one to describe the future, he or she has to point to the past or present. He also has a problem with the B-series. To him, there is no change in the sequence; 2013 will always be earlier than 2014. With these arguments, he states that time is not real.
McTaggart is long on dialectic content than actual convincing arguments. Of interest to me in the whole argument is the fact that he asserts that A-series time does not occur. He made the argument convoluted and complicated. He seems to believe that the ‘future’ is nothing making it the missing link in the A-series continuum. Several critics have dismissed his assertion. The most prominent is C. Broad. The intellectual from the 1920’s and 1930’s points out that McTaggart had a lot of admirers, but no followers since his arguments did not have any real substance (Nyiri, 2008). As espoused by Kristof Nyiri in his lecture in 1998, Broad sought to show that McTaggart was not honest in his assessment.