Time and Metaphysics: Kant and McTaggart on the Reality of Time

The paper examines Kant's theory of time in light of McTaggart's argument that time is unreal. First, it presents McTaggart's theory of time and his argument that a contradiction inevitably emerges in time's analysis, leading either to an infinite regress of times or the denial that time is real. The paper then shows that Kant rejects the absolute notion of time, the idea that there are eternal coordinates that are experienced by us as being in time. It argues against subjectivist or psychological interpretations of Kant's theory of time. The main argument is that Kant's notion of a priori intuition, rather than being the flow of mental states in consciousness, is the subject's self-intuition as being temporally present, and, moreover, that the present acts as a temporal metric, specifying a first-person perspective in the world and designating a temporal simple.