McTaggart takes a bold step in trying to disprove the existence of a phenomenon as taken for granted and unquestioned as breathing when he tackles the issue of time. If for no other reason, this quest is extremely daring in its scope, because he chooses to question an entity whose reality has probably never crossed most people's minds.
McTaggart's goal in his paper is, on a large scale, to prove that time does not exist. We will, however, be tackling the aspect of time known as the A-Series in this essay. His entire argument rests on his ability to prove this A-Series is unreal. The A-Series is the "tense" component of time that we perceive. When we refer to happenings in our lives, they occur in the past, present or future tense. Which tense a given event commands depends on its relation to a moving "now." As we move through life, things in the future move ever closer to the present and after an event occurs it is forever moving further and further into the past thanks to the forward-moving "now." McTaggart's goal is to prove the logical difficulties that the concept of the moving "now's" existence calls to mind, and it is these difficulties that ultimately lead McTaggart to rule out time's existence.
McTaggart's first step in proving his point is to highlight the incompatibility of the respective tenses of past, present and future. The incompatibility lies in the fact that no event can possess all of these properties at once. At first glance this may seem like an obvious and meaningless thing to say, because no one would argue that anything represents all these qualities at one time. Instead, most would be inclined to point out that an occasion holds all three of th ...