Bertrand Russell on the B-Series and Mental-Physical Time 1901–1915

Abstract In 1908, J. M. E. McTaggart wondered if the ‘real nature of time only contains . . . the B series’. If B-theory is understood as affirming this then, along with many other scholars, the author read Russell as a B-theorist. This chapter focuses on a key part of Russell’s B-theory: his distinction between ‘physical’, objective time, comprising simultaneity, before, and after; and ‘mental’, subjective time, comprising past, present, and future. This original distinction first appears in Ru