J. M. E. Mc Taggart - Personal Life

Personal Life

J. M. E. McTaggart was born in 1866 in London to Francis and Ellen Ellis. At birth, he was named John McTaggart Ellis, after his maternal grand-uncle, John McTaggart. Early in his life, his family took the surname McTaggart as a condition of inheritance from that same uncle. McTaggart attended Clifton College, Bristol, before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1885. At Trinity he was taught for the Moral Sciences Tripos by Henry Sidgwick and James Ward, both distinguished philosophers. After obtaining First class honours (the only student of Moral Sciences to do so in 1888), he was, in 1891, elected to a prize fellowship at Trinity on the basis of a dissertation on Hegel's Logic. McTaggart had in the meantime been President of the Union Society, a debating club, and the secretive Cambridge Apostles. In 1897 he was appointed to a college lectureship in Philosophy, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1923 (although he continued to lecture until his death).

McTaggart, although radical in his youth, became increasingly conservative and was influential in the expulsion of Bertrand Russell from Trinity for pacifism during World War I. But McTaggart was a man of contradictions: despite his conservatism he was an advocate of women's suffrage; and though an atheist from his youth was a firm believer in human immortality and a defender of the Church of England. He was personally charming and had interests ranging beyond philosophy, known for his encyclopaedic knowledge of English novels and eighteenth-century memoirs.

His honours included an honorary LLD from the University of St. Andrews and Fellowship of the British Academy.

He died in London in 1925. In 1899 he had married Margaret Elizabeth Bird in New Zealand whom he met while visiting his mother (then living in near New Plymouth, Taranaki) and was survived by her; the couple had no children.