Talk:Eternal return

message: The phrase (time is a) flat circle is a fairly recent US idiom that refers the idea of eternal recurrence. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:1D95:5AEE:422F:8A5B (talk) 14:45, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I hadn't heard of this before, but I just looked it up. It's a quote from a season 1 episode of True Detective which apparently caught people's attention and became a meme. It has some surprising longevity for a meme, presumably because it expresses an idea that most people haven't heard of in a vaguely impressive-sounding way (though of course the phrase is redundant if taken literally; there's no such thing as a three-dimensional circle). I don't think the quote should be included in the article, because it doesn't tell us anything new about the concept of eternal return, unless we've got a source that says this line from True Detective played a significant role in popularizing Nietzschean philosophy among the general public or something. 91.85.220.117 (talk) 17:19, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Flat Circle" 

message: I don't want to come across like I'm trying to "own" the current version of the article (I wrote a large part of the current version under my former username, DanFromAnotherPlace), but since you didn't leave an edit summary it's not clear to me why you thought these changes were an improvement, so I'd like to discuss it further. I believe they were not an improvement, for the following reasons:
*I think generally that complex topics should be explained as simply as possible, especially in the lead. A phrase like "time repeats itself", while possibly over-simplistic, is much easier for the general reader to understand than "a permanent, fluctuating repetition of circumstances", which I think is not only denser but more ambiguous. Your changes to the lead also introduced two ideas – viz. that the concept is exclusive to continental philosophy, and that it always entails an ethical imperative – which are not found in the article or its sources.
*Some minor changes that I'm sure were meant as good-faith copyedits have actually changed the meaning. "The Stoics believed..." has been changed to "Zeno of Citium, who believed...", but I'm not aware of any evidence that Zeno himself held this belief. "may have originated with Pythagoras" has been changed to "scholarly argued to have originated with Pythagoras", which is true but feels too limiting; I would take the latter phrase to mean that this is a novel theory proposed by modern scholars, when in fact the attribution is found in ancient Greek and Roman authors.
*Some parenthetical date ranges have been removed, but I think these serve a useful purpose in an article that covers a span of some two thousand years. Readers may want to know, for example, when Origen lived in relation to Augustine, without having to click through to both articles to find out.
*Changing "ise" to "ize" without consensus is inappropriate per MOS:VAR.
*The introduction of Nietzche's ideas into the "Precursors" section is jumping the gun, and disrupts the flow of the paragraph. Possibly this quote could be incorporated into the "Interpretations" section, with regard to the question of how far Nietzsche believed in the idea as a scientific fact, though it would be helpful to have a secondary source that mentions it.
Sojourner in the earth (talk) 04:42, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: thanks for your feedback TreeLethargy (talk) 05:18, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent changes 

message: "One of core tenant..." should read "One of the core tenets of..." 189.129.111.91 (talk) 03:36, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Corrected thank you! Soothsayer79 (talk) 12:58, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Change "tenant" to "tenet"