that has received the most attention in 20th Century philosophy of time. In the later version of the argument, in The Nature of Existence, McTaggart no longer advances the circularity objection. This is, arguably, because by then he has come to treat tense as a simple and indefinable notion, and thus cannot contend that the terms need to be explained at all in order to be applied. He now instead argues that even if it is admitted that they are simple and indefinable, and thus can be applied without further analysis, they still lead to contradiction. Philosophers who favour the B-view of time tend to find McTaggart's argument against the A-series to demonstrate conclusively that tense involves a contradiction. On the other hand, philosophers who favour the A-view of time struggle to see why the argument should be considered to have any force. Two of the most commonly invoked objections are, first, that McTaggart is mistaken about the phenomenology of time; that he is claiming to see a contradiction in the appearance of time, where none is apparent. Second, that McTaggart is mistaken about the semantics of tensed discourse. The idea here is that claims like "M is present, has been future, and will be past" can only imply a contradiction if it is interpreted as saying that M is all at once future in the past, present in the present, and also past in the future. This reading, it is argued, is absurd because "has been" and "will be" indicate that we are not talking about how M currently is, but instead of how M once was, but is no longer, and how it will be, but is not yet. Hence it is wrong to think of the expression as an attribution to M of futurity, presentness, and pastness, all at once (Marhenke 1935; Broad 1938; Mink 1960; Prior 1967; Christensen 1974; Lloyd 1977; Lowe 1987). Ingthorsson has argued that the reason for this incommensurability between the proponents of the A- and B-views is found in the prevailing view that McTaggart's argument is a stand-alone argument. If it is read in that way, the proponents of each view will understand the argument against the background of their respective views of time, and come to incompatible conclusions (1998 & 2016). Indeed, on closer scrutiny it will be found that McTaggart explicitly claims that in "The Unreality of Time" he is