J.M.E. McTaggart

Download or read book J.M.E. McTaggart written by Ramesh K. Sharma and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J.M.E. McTaggart seeks to critically expound and appraise the British philosopher’s thought with respect to three principal themes of his philosophy: substance, self, and immortality. Ramesh Kumar Sharma guides the reader through the labyrinths of McTaggart’s intricate arguments and defends many of McTaggart’s highly unorthodox doctrines and conclusions. While doing this, Sharma draws on the works of, among others, Berkeley, Hegel, and Leibniz, and at the same time attacks numerous modern-day physicalist theories that propound mind-brain identity as against the presumed reality of the self and consciousness. This work is thus recommended both for philosophers and researchers interested in: (1) such perennial metaphysical subjects as reality, existence, possibility, the basic ontological categories of substance, qualities, and relations (universals); (2) the question of the reality of the self; (3) McTaggart’s overall vision of the universe or Absolute, and his rejection of the more or less predominant view that the Absolute is God; (4) McTaggart’s unique doctrine, after Plato, of the immortality of the self combined with (the self ’s) pre-existence, post-existence, and plurality of lives; and (5) his extraordinary, but important, views on perception.