[5] 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),[6] he was, in 1891, elected to a prize fellowship at Trinity on the basis of a dissertation on Hegel's Logic.

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).

[7] 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.

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

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

McTaggart's earlier work was devoted to an exposition and critique of Hegel's metaphysical methods and conclusions and their application in other fields.

However, he by no means reached the same conclusions as the previous generations of British idealists and in his later work came to hold strikingly different and original views.

Indeed, his later work and mature system can be seen as largely an attempt to give substance to his new conception of the absolute.

McTaggart is best known today for his attempt to prove that our concept of time involves a contradiction and that therefore reality cannot be temporal.

In his later work, particularly his two-volume The Nature of Existence, McTaggart developed his own, highly original, metaphysical system.

In The Nature of Existence McTaggart defended a similar Hegelian view of the universe to that of his earlier work on the basis not of Hegel's dialectics but rather in the mode of more modern metaphysics.

The logical rigour of his system is in evidence, for example, in McTaggart's famous attempted proof of the unreality of time.

McTaggart was the most influential advocate of neo-Hegelian idealism in Cambridge at the time of Russell and Moore's reaction against it, as well as being a teacher and personal acquaintance of both men.

With F. H. Bradley of Oxford he was, as the most prominent of the surviving British Idealists, the primary target of the new realists' assault.

Given that modern analytic philosophy can arguably be traced to the work of Russell and Moore in this period, McTaggart's work retains interest to the historian of analytic philosophy despite being, in a very real sense, the product of an earlier age.

Historian of philosophy Emily Thomas has commented that "philosophers have since written tens of thousands of pages about it.