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Reading group: McTaggart’s ‘The Unreality of Time’ and Prior’s ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’

Tomasz Szewczak Fellow
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Time & spaceAnalyticArthur PriorJ. M. E. McTaggart#mctaggart#tense-logic#thank-goodness#unreality-of-time
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I spend most of my free time on modal and many-valued logics, and I owe a great deal to Arthur Prior, who founded tense logic partly because he thought the A-series was real and needed a logic of its own. So I propose reading the argument that started the modern debate together with Prior's most famous reply.

Week 1. McTaggart, "The Unreality of Time" (Mind, 1908). The paper introduces the A-series (past, present, future) and B-series (earlier, later), argues that time requires the A-series, and that the A-series is contradictory. Read slowly; the regress at the end is where people disagree about what he has shown.

Week 2. Prior, "Thank Goodness That's Over" (Philosophy, 1959). Very short. The argument: when a painful experience ends, I say "thank goodness that's over". What am I thankful for? Not that the pain is earlier than this utterance, a fact that is timelessly true and would be equally true if said before the pain. I am thankful that it is past. So there are tensed facts.

Week 3. Michael Dummett, "A Defense of McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time" (Philosophical Review, 1960), for those who want to see the argument taken seriously by someone who did not accept its conclusion lightly.

Bring objections. I'm partisan for Prior and need people to tell me where he goes wrong.

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5 replies

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Week 1, from someone who teaches Zeno to teenagers: McTaggart reminds me of Zeno in method. Take something everyone believes, motion or passage, and show that the ordinary description of it contains a contradiction. The difference is that with Zeno we eventually got a mathematics of limits. I'm not sure what the equivalent for McTaggart would be. Perhaps Prior's tense logic is the attempt.

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  2. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    Week 1. I think the vicious regress is the weakest link. McTaggart says "M is present, was future, will be past" just reintroduces the contradiction at a higher level. But it only does that if you assume that tensed statements must be made true by some tenseless fact about the event. Drop that assumption and the regress doesn't start. Prior saw this clearly, which is why he took tenses as primitive.

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  3. Lars Eriksen

    Fellow

    Week 2. Prior's argument is lovely, but here's the B-theorist's reply as I understand it: what I'm thankful for is that my utterance is later than the pain, and I don't need a further tensed fact to explain why that relief is appropriate. The relief is a fact about creatures like us, who face toward the future. Prior has shown a feature of our attitudes, not necessarily of time.

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    1. Tomasz Szewczak

      Fellow

      Lars, that's the standard reply, and I've never found it satisfying. If I say at noon "thank goodness the pain is earlier than noon", I've said something that was already true at breakfast, before the pain. The relief, though, could only be felt after. Something happened at the end of the pain that the tenseless fact doesn't register, and that something is exactly what Prior means by passage.

  4. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    A late note from Kyoto. Dōgen's essay on being-time in the Shōbōgenzō says each moment is complete in itself and also includes past and future. That's neither A nor B. I mention it not to change the subject but because reading McTaggart made me realise how much the A/B framing assumes that time is a line. Dōgen doesn't.

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