Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart

ian. 1896 · University Press

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John McTaggart was a British metaphysician who taught at Cambridge University from 1897 to 1923. He was one of the main figures in the school of Hegelianism that flourished in Great Britain from the third quarter of the nineteenth century well into the first quarter of the twentieth century. Though he ranks beside F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, McTaggart espoused a peculiar brand of Hegelian idealism. On Georg Hegel, he was a superb commentator, but never a slavish expositor. While he believed that reality is essentially spiritual, his idealism retreated from conjuring up absolutes. Rather, he insisted on the primacy of finite individual persons. His denial of the existence of time has continued to intrigue philosophers. His "Nature of Existence" has incited the extensive critique of Charles Dunbar Broad, in what is perhaps the most celebrated instance in twentieth-century philosophy of an exceptionally prominent and influential thinker painstakingly, and at length, commenting on the work of another.