Examination of McTaggart's philosophy
Cambridge, 1938
Abstract
This work is a meticulous examination of the two-volume work The Nature of Existence by John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, a renowned philosopher of the early 20th century. McTaggart’s philosophy is a complex system that attempts to construct a metaphysics founded on the principles of endless divisibility and determining correspondence. The author begins by outlining McTaggart’s psychological and epistemological foundations, including his analysis of cogitation, prehension, sense perception, volition, and emotion. He then delves into McTaggart’s arguments against the reality of space, time, and matter, and proposes counterarguments. McTaggart’s mentalism, which holds that all particulars are spiritual and none are material, is carefully examined and compared to the mentalism of Leibniz. The author concludes by exploring McTaggart’s theory of value in the universe, arguing that, despite its internal inconsistencies, McTaggart’s system offers a unique and intriguing approach to the fundamental questions of metaphysics. – AI-generated abstract.
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It seems to me that many theories of the universe may be dismissed at once, not as too good, but as too cosy, to be true. One feels sure that they could have arisen only among people living a peculiarly sheltered life at a peculiarly favourable period of the world’s history. No theory need be seriously considered unless it recognises that the world has always been for most men and all animals other than domestic pets a scene of desperate struggle in which great evils are suffered and inflicted. No theory need be seriously considered unless it recognises how utterly alien most of the non-human life even on this small planet is to man and his ideals; how slight a proportion ostensibly living matter bears to the matter which is ostensibly inanimate; and that man himself can live and thrive only by killing and eating other living beings, animal or vegetable. Any optimism which is not merely silly and childish must maintain itself, if it can, in spite of and in conscious recognition of these facts.
Finally I would say that, for me at any rate, the five years which I have spent in wrestling with McTaggart’s system and putting the results into writing have been both pleasant and intellectually profitable. I derive a certain satisfaction from reflecting that there is one subject at least about which I probably know more than anyone else in the universe with the possible exception of God (if he exists) and McTaggart (if he survives).
In the controversies of party politics, which move at the intellectual level of a preparatory school, it is counted a score against a man if he can be shown ever to have altered his mind on extremely difficult questions in a rapidly changing world. In the less puerile realm of science and philosophy it is not considered disgraceful to learn as well as to live, and this kind of stone has no weight and is not worth throwing.