ABSTRACT
The various parts of McTaggart's argument challenged in a wide variety of ways but there is only one part that has consistently defended to any degree worth mentioning. McTaggart's phenomenological analysis of the appearance of time in terms of an A and B series has been widely accepted, but there is no elaborate defense to be found. Its acceptance simply emerges in the frequent appeal to his analysis in the philosophy of time and in modern tense logic. According to Dummett, the proof proceeds initially by inviting the reader to accept two conditions for the reality of an A series, both of which are implied by the phenomenological analysis: that any given event M is either future, present, or past, and that in time M will change with respect to being future, present, and past. McTaggart and the defenders are arguing from completely different conceptual frameworks on the basis of very different metaphysical assumptions.
