This article offers an exposition of McTaggart’s paradox and examines several influential interpretations of it. Its principal aim is to reconsider the argument of John Ellis McTaggart, the prominent early twentieth-century metaphysician, for the unreality of time as articulated through a fundamental opposition between two ideas: “absolute reality” and “tensed reality,” and to draw from this opposition a number of conclusions relevant to contemporary philosophical debates concerning the nature of time. To this end, it reconstructs, with close attention to McTaggart’s own formulation, the structure of his argument—an argument intended to demonstrate that time involves a contradiction and therefore cannot be real. It then analyzes and assesses several alternative interpretations of the paradox: Heather Dyke’s account of the contradiction of tense, Huw Price’s view regarding the tension between inclusivity and exclusivity, and, most notably, Michael Dummett’s interpretation. Dummett maintains that the success of McTaggart’s paradox depends upon the acceptance of a substantive philosophical presupposition, namely, that a complete description of reality is, in principle, possible. Finally, the article argues that understanding McTaggart’s paradox within this framework has significant implications for assessing the legitimacy of the philosophical dispute between the A-theory and the B-theory of time. In particular, appeals to naturalistic arguments—that is, those invoking physical theories—in support of the B-theory rely upon a specific philosophical presupposition concerning the possibility of an absolute description of reality and are therefore vulnerable to the charge of begging the question.
Keywords: McTaggart’s paradox, A-theory, B-theory, tensed reality, absolute reality, physical theories, metametaphysics
Introduction
The philosophical debate over the nature of time has been profoundly influenced by “McTaggart’s Paradox,” proposed by J. M. E. McTaggart in his 1908 article “The Unreality of Time” and later published, with some modifications, in his posthumous work The Nature of Existence. McTaggart sought to demonstrate that the notion of time contains inherent contradictions when subjected to metaphysical scrutiny. His radical conclusion—that time is unreal—stems from his Hegelian idealist background. Although many contemporary philosophers reject McTaggart’s argument, his conceptual and metaphysical framework, particularly the distinction between the A-series and the B-series, remains foundational to contemporary metaphysics of time.
This article aims to reconstruct the paradox as a fundamental conflict between two competing metaphysical notions: Absolute Reality (reality as a complete, objective, and observer-independent whole) and Tensed Reality (reality insofar as it involves A-theoretic change). It then introduces several influential interpretations of the paradox (including those of Heather Dyke, Huw Price, Michael Dummett, and E. J. Lowe) in order to further illuminate the conflict between these two notions. It subsequently argues that this understanding of the paradox has significant implications for the legitimacy of the modern metaphysical and naturalistic debate between A-theory and B-theory, insofar as both positions may rest on unexamined presuppositions that beg the question against one another.
Materials & Methods
This study employs a methodology based on the logical reconstruction and comparative analysis of McTaggart’s original texts in relation to major twentieth- and twenty-first-century interpretations of the paradox. The primary materials examined include:
i. McTaggart’s Original Formulation: Focusing on the 1927 formulation of the paradox, particularly his distinction between the A-series (past, present, and future), the B-series (earlier than and later than), and the C-series (a non-temporal ordering), as well as the articulation of his overall account of time.
ii. Modern Interpretations: An analysis of several contemporary interpretations of the paradox, including Dyke’s “paradox of tense,” Price’s account of the tension between “inclusivity” and “exclusivity,” Dummett’s account of the paradox through the notion of a “complete description” of reality, and Lowe’s critique based on the “indexical fallacy.”
iii. Metaphysical Evaluation: The article examines the metametaphysical implications of these philosophical interpretations for the A-theory/B-theory debate itself, as well as for naturalistic arguments derived from modern physics.
Discussion & Result
a) The Structure of McTaggart’s Argument:
McTaggart’s argument proceeds through five logical steps: (1) time requires change; (2) change requires the A-series; (3) the A-series is contradictory; (4) therefore, change is contradictory; and (5) consequently, time is unreal. He argues that the B-series, which is constituted by static temporal relations, cannot adequately account for change, since the events themselves must be the subjects of change. An event such as the “death of Queen Anne” changes only with respect to its A-determinations: it moves from being in the distant future, to the near future, to the present, and subsequently further into the past.
The contradiction arises because the A-determinations (past, present, and future) are mutually exclusive, yet every event must possess all three in order to belong to a temporal series. When one attempts to resolve this difficulty by claiming that an event is present at one moment and past at another, McTaggart argues that this generates a vicious infinite regress.
b) Absolute vs. Tensed:
Heather Dyke reformulates the paradox by emphasizing the tension between absolute A-theoretic distinctions and the reality of temporal passage. According to her interpretation, if genuine passage is admitted, the distinctions between past, present, and future can no longer remain absolute, since every event successively occupies each of these temporal positions. In a similar vein, Huw Price highlights a conflict between “exclusivity” (the claim that only one moment is objectively now) and “inclusivity” (the claim that every moment may equally be regarded as now). This conflict can be interpreted as reflecting the difficulty of reconciling subjective temporal experience with an objective account of reality.
Michael Dummett advances one of the most influential readings of the paradox by connecting it to the possibility of a complete description of reality. He contends that if time is genuinely real, then reality must be irreducibly tensed, making a fully observer-independent view (from nowhere) unattainable. On this interpretation, anyone who maintains that reality must ultimately admit of a complete and objective description is driven, in a manner similar to McTaggart, toward the conclusion that time is unreal.
c) Results for the Metametaphysics of Time:
A central result of this analysis is the identification of question-begging reasoning within the contemporary debate between A-theory and B-theory. The B-theory, which conceives of time as a static “block,” frequently maintains that the A-theory is logically contradictory on the basis of McTaggart’s paradox. However, this alleged contradiction arises only if one already accepts the B-theoretic metaphysical assumption that reality must ultimately be describable within a complete and non-perspectival framework.
Furthermore, the appeal to Special Theory of Relativity as a “naturalistic” justification for B-theory proves to be equally problematic. Physics, by its very methodology, aims at a complete and objective description of the world and therefore operates within a framework that quantifies over all events—past, present, and future—treating them as equally real. However, because A-theory denies the possibility of such an absolute and static description of a fundamentally tensed reality, the use of a physical framework that already presupposes a B-theoretic ontology in order to refute A-theory appears to involve a form of question-begging reasoning.
Conclusion
The analysis demonstrates that the paradox does not conclusively establish the unreality of time; rather, it forces a choice between two competing metaphysical commitments. If one requires reality to admit of a complete and objective description, then the reality of tense must be abandoned. Conversely, if one maintains that time and change are genuinely real, one must reject the idea that reality can be fully captured as a complete and absolute whole. On this interpretation, the debate between A-theory and B-theory rests upon fundamentally different metaphysical starting points, and the legitimacy of the dispute itself depends upon whether priority is given to the ideal of the Absolute or to the reality of temporal becoming.