A series and B series
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In
History
McTaggart's series
McTaggart distinguished the ancient conceptions as a set of relations. According to McTaggart, there are two distinct modes in which all events can be ordered in time.
A series
In the first mode, events are ordered as future, present, and past. Futurity and pastness allow of degrees, while the present does not. When we speak of time in this way, we are speaking in terms of a series of positions which run from the remote past through the recent past to the present, and from the present through the near future all the way to the remote future. The essential characteristic of this descriptive modality is that one must think of the series of temporal positions as being in continual transformation, in the sense that an event is first part of the past, then part of the present, and then part of the future. Moreover, the assertions made according to this modality correspond to the temporal perspective of the person who utters them. This is the A series of temporal events.
Although originally McTaggart defined tenses as relational qualities, i.e. qualities that events possess by standing in a certain relations to something outside of time (that does not change its position in time),[1] today it is popularly believed that he treated tenses as monadic properties. Later philosophers[clarification needed] have independently inferred that McTaggart must have understood tense as monadic because English tenses are normally expressed by the non-relational singular predicates "is past", "is present" and "is future", as noted by R. D. Ingthorsson.[2]
B series
From a second point of view,
An important difference between the two series is that while events continuously change their position in the A series, their position in the B series does not. If an event ever is earlier than some events and later than the rest, it is always earlier than and later than those very events. Furthermore, while events acquire their A series determinations through a relation to something outside of time, their B series determinations hold between the events that constitutes the B series. This is the B series, and the philosophy that says all truths about time can be reduced to B series statements is the B-theory of time.
Distinctions
The
Relation to other ideas in the philosophy of time
There are two principal varieties of the A-theory,
See also
Notes
- ^ McTaggart, J. M. E. (1927). The Nature of Existence, Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. § 326.
It seems quite clear to me that [tenses] are not qualities but relations, though of course, like other relations, they will generate relational qualities in each of their terms
- ISBN 978-1-138-67724-1.
- ^ Presentism and the Space-Time Manifold by Dean Zimmerman, p. 7
References
- Craig, William Lane, The Tensed Theory of Time, Springer, 2000.
- Craig, William Lane, The Tenseless Theory of Time, Springer, 2010.
- Ingthorsson, R. D., "McTaggart's Paradox", Routledge, 2016.
- McTaggart, J. E., 'The Unreality of Time', Mind, 1908.
- McTaggart, J. E.,The Nature of Existence, vols. 1-2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968.
- Bradley, F. H., The Principles of Logic, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1922.
External links
- "Notes on McTaggart, 'The Unreality of Time' ". Seminar on Philosophy and Time, Trinity University, 2005.
- Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "McTaggart's A series and B series". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.