SOURCE: “McTaggart's Analysis of Time,” in American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, April, 1966, pp. 145-52.

In the following essay, Gale discusses McTaggart's theory of the unreality of time and examines the philosophical refutations of the theory, which fall into two separate and competing analyses.

McTaggart's famed argument for the unreality of time, first presented by him in 1908 in Mind, comprises both a positive and a negative thesis. The positive thesis, which is presented in the first part of the argument, contains an analysis of the concept of time, which McTaggart claims to be the only correct one. The negative thesis which is presented in the second part of the argument attempts to show that this analysis of the concept of time entails a contradiction. The assumption here is that any concept which is contradictory cannot be true of reality, and therefore time is unreal. It is vital to distinguish...