Mctaggart, John Mctaggart Ellis(1866–1925)
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, a British metaphysician, was born in London, the son of Francis and Caroline Ellis. (His father later took the name McTaggart to fulfill a condition for inheriting a bequest.) He attended school at Clifton and went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took first-class honors in the moral science tripos in 1888. He was made a fellow of Trinity in 1891. The next year he paid a visit to New Zealand, where his widowed mother lived, and there he met Margaret Elizabeth Bird, whom he married in 1899, during a second visit to New Zealand. Thereafter he resided at Cambridge. Active in the affairs of his college and the university, he was a busy and successful teacher from 1897 until he retired in 1923. He died suddenly in January 1925.
McTaggart's philosophy is a peculiar and quite personal variety of Hegelian idealism. Ultimate reality, he held, is spiritual: It consists entirely of individual minds and their contents. He understood this in a way that excludes space, time, and material objects from reality. What appear to us as being these things are really minds and parts of the contents of minds, but we "misperceive" these entities in a systematic way, and this misperception is the source of the whole apparent universe.
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