Abstract

Destructive arguments such as Zeno’s against the reality of motion and McTaggart’s against the reality of time often provoke an intellectual unease. One reason, perhaps, is that arguments of this sort necessarily throw us into company with something counterfeit. In the case of McTaggart, either his argument is unsound or our perception of the world as temporally ordered is illusory. Thus, we may feel an immediate need to identify the counterfeit alternative, to agree or disagree with the argument and to show why. However, this usually means that we are not primarily engaged with McTaggart in a discussion about time; rather, we are involved in arguing about an argument. The more interesting and significant responses emerge not until we move beyond the impulse to accept or reject the argument. For example, we may hold that McTaggart fails to prove the unreality of time, and yet think that his argument can teach us something important about time. And this is the view to be developed here.