AtD: John MacTaggart Ellis MacTaggart

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Jul 3 09:51:17 CDT 2019


was a philosopher at Trinity College, Cambridge, who enjoyed a considerable
reputation in his day.
I have never read any of his works, but I believe that he was an Hegelian;
an exponent of a philosophy now
out of favor, except in the form of Dialectical Materialism. ...
But it is said to have been Mr. MacTaggart who offers the explanation that
the word *runcible *means *tortoise-shell*
[ basing this on two books *The Owl and the Pussycat *and *The Pobble who
Has No Toes. ]*
*                                                         ----T. S. Eliot *in
"Can 'Education' Be Defined" collected in *To Criticize the Critic*

Highly probable that this is the first place TRP learned of MacTaggart and
I think I see how TRP uses him to
satirize Marxism a bit and Hegelian semi-notions---history unfolding to a
great Spirit [knowledge], say.

In fact, he might be mocking The Phenomenology of Spirit with the
Trespassers.

THIS is where our history leads.


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