The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis
1866–1925, British philosopher. A student of G. W. Hegel, by whom he was strongly influenced, he taught at Trinity College, Cambridge (1897–1923). Believing that the ultimate reality was spiritual, he denied the real existence of the material, of space, and of time. He was also a determinist but held that determinism was not incompatible with moral obligation. His writings included Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), A Commentary On Hegel’s Logic (1910), and his great work The Nature of Existence (2 vol., 1921–27).
See biography by G. L. Dickinson (1931); C. D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy (2 vol., 1933, 1938); R. M. Gale, The Language of Time (1968).
