Abstract

This dissertation has two primary objectives: to set out metaphysical principles of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical description of the universe, and to demonstrate to what extent they entail his culminating cosmological conception, the eternal recurrence of the same. ;Chapter I argues that Nietzsche's unpublished notes can legitimately be used to fill out the picture derived from the published texts. ;Chapter II explains Nietzsche's philosophic method, articulates his conception of truth, and shows that his rejection of absolute truth, if taken self-referentially, does not involve an inconsistency. ;Chapter III analyzes the effects of subject-predicate grammar and of survival-orientated modes of perception on the development of what Nietzsche takes to be the erroneous belief that the world is made up of persistent, self-identical substances. ;Chapter IV examines Nietzsche's account of the human mind and body as force in process rather than self-identical substance. ;Chapter V deals with the pattern of this process, as revealed more clearly in the evolution of consciousness, and in the development of social systems and living organisms. ;Chapter VI shows how this process is exemplified even in inorganic forces, and how Nietzsche reduces all events in the universe to manifestations of a primordial will to power, operating within all systems of force. ;Chapter VII examines Nietzsche's criticism of the conception that events are extrinsically caused, and explains his alternative conception of necessity as inexorable resolution of differences of power. ;Chapter VIII examines Nietzsche's critique of succession and duration, and his claim that in a world of will to power every resolution of power differences occurs momentarily. ;Chapter IX examines Nietzsche's account of space as perspectival, and of universal space as finite and positively curved. ;Chapter X demonstrates that, although Nietzsche's arguments for eternal recurrence are inadequate, the conception to some extent follows from his metaphysical principles concerning force, necessity, space and time. ;Chapter XI shows that various criticisms made of eternal recurrence are based on misunderstanding of its metaphysical principles. ;Chapter XII establishes that the conception of eternal recurrence, although not provable, is perhaps falsifiable, and that the evidence of contemporary scientific cosmology does not conclusively falsify it