Abstract

In 1894, John McTaggart reviewed Francis Bradley’s major work, Appearance and Reality. I know of no other review by McTaggart of Bradley’s work; and I know of no review by Bradley of McTaggart’s work. McTaggart, then 28 years old, had been a Cambridge Fellow for only three years. Bradley, 48 years old and a leading figure at Oxford, was at the height of his powers. He has been seen as a culmination of the English Idealism, or Neo-Hegelianism, that both philosophers shared. McTaggart has been seen as a postscript, yielding his life’s work only after his Cambridge colleagues like Russell had, in a sense, effected a sea change in the direction of British and Anglo-Saxon philosophical discourse. The first volume of McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence was to appear only in 1921. A better understanding of McTaggart’s work can be obtained by a double reading — a reading that considers McTaggart’s metaphysics in the light of Bradley’s work and that considers Bradley’s metaphysics in light of McTaggart’s work. To illustrate this, this paper will focus on a single item in their respective metaphysics, the unreality of time.