On Friday 2 May 2018 Professor Nikos Psarros, University of Leipzig, delivered a lecture with the title ¨John McTaggart's Concept of the 'self¨ for the Theoretical Ethics ΙΙ class.

Abstract: In his seminal work “The Nature of Existence” (vol. I+II, Cambridge 1921 & 1927) the British philosopher John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925) aims at developing a consistent concept of substance that avoids Spinoza’s paradox of only one substance that is identical with the world in its totality and with the spiritual principle of the world (God), and also Leibniz’ mystical concept of totally separated Monads that share the same perception of the universe imposed on them by God. For McTaggart substances have to be on the one hand radically separated from each other, on the other hand, however, they must be able to form agglomerates that have also the character of substance. Additionally, a substance must be divisible to infinity without contradiction, i.e. its parts must be connected in such a way that they are necessarily and exclusively the parts of this substance and of no other substance, despite the fact that they are somehow related to the parts of the other substances. This specific kind of inner connection of the parts of a substance McTaggart calls “determining correspondence”. McTaggart concludes that the only possible candidate that fulfils the criteria of his concept of substance are what he calls “spirits” or “selves”, i.e. thinking substances. The parts of a McTaggartian “self” are “perceptions”, i.e. single acts of thinking. It can be shown that between the perceptions of a self, and only between them, the relation οf determining correspondence holds. The world consists thus, according to McTaggart, of an agglomerate of an infinite number of selves, with each self consisting of an infinite number of perceptions, while each perception “contains” the whole system of selves – the universe. Space, time, change, matter and what is known in philosophy as Aristotelian substances, are nothing else than the erroneous perceptions of this absolute reality, i.e. they are unreal, despite the fact that they have some relationship to the absolute reality and make up the world as we perceive it. In the same sense unreal are also cognitions and emotions, with one exception, namely a fundamental emotion that McTaggart calls “love”. From these ontological premises McTaggart derives a form of life that is a synthesis of vita contemplativa and vita activa.

See full text here.

Bio-note: Nikos Psarros is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig. His areas of research are ontology, philosophy of nature, social ontology and philosophy of science.

Contact: psarros[at]uni-leipzig[dot]de