Abstract

Nietzsche's doctrine of the -eternal recurrence of the same- - the conception that the universe of events repeats itself in the same sequence, to infinity - is often taken to be logically incoherent: if an event recurs, it is not identically the same as the event itself, and if taken as self-identical cannot be the recurrence of anything. This book offers a new interpretation of the doctrine so as to rescue it from the charge of incoherence. It shows that the doctrine is an outgrowth of ideas found in Nietzsche's philosophy of nature, among them that space is Riemannian and that time is relative to events, not an independently existing continuum which underlies events."