Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group Talk (Neil Sinhababu, Singapore)

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is delighted to welcome as its guest speaker Neil Sinhababu, an associate professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Sinhababu’s areas of research include ethics, Nietzsche, political philosophy, metaphysics, as well as philosophy of mind and action.

Talk Title

Nietzsche and the Eternal Recurrence

Talk Abstract

The idea of the eternal recurrence is that everyone will live the exact same lives again an infinite number of times. Nietzsche appreciates that this would multiply the value of a single life by infinity, justifying intense emotional responses. His unpublished notes anticipate Poincaré’s recurrence theorem with a cosmological argument for the eternal recurrence. Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes its hero discovering this argument and struggling to accept the resulting infinities of everything bad in his life. He eventually comes to love the eternal recurrence because it provides infinities of everything good in his life.

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is a a subgroup of the History of Philosophy Research Group, which focuses on European philosophy in Kant and post-Kantian traditions.