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...