Known today mainly as the author of a paradox designed to prove the unreality of time--which, even if it has not convinced many, nonetheless served as the starting point for the great majority of philosophical discussions about time in the twentieth century--J. M. E. McTaggart was a philosopher whose contributions to scholarship on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and to metaphysics established him as a leading thinker of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Although McTaggart is usually identified as a member of the school of British idealism, a movement that also included Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley, Edward Caird, and T. H. Green, he was an original thinker and in many respects quite unlike the other members of this school. He was, for example, a personal idealist, in that he believed that reality is best understood as a community of finite spirits; but unlike most other personal...