Brush, Stephen G.  "Nietzsche's Recurrence Revisited: The French Connection."  Journal History of Philosophy 19 (April 1981): 235-38.

Excerpt:

“Joe Krueger’s article is the latest and perhaps the best of a long series of attempts to explicate the historical background and philosophical significance of Nietzsche’s theory of the Eternal Recurrence. I Yet, like almost all previous commentators, Krueger ignores what seems to me one of the most fascinating aspects of the subject: its relation to Henri Poincare’s recurrence theorem in mechanics. Since Nietzsche himself presented his theory as a deduction from physics, it would seem that the most obvious starting point for its interpretation is the physics of his own time; I agree with Krueger that Rose Pfeffer’s claim for an adumbration of quantum concepts is not very plausible. While Nietzsche developed his theory at about the same time as Poincare, it would not be accurate to speak of “simultaneous discovery” since his “proof” did not address the mathematical issues which Poincare considered crucial; more- over, the philosophical significance of the theory was almost exactly the opposite for Nietzsche and for Poincare. Nevertheless the relations between the two may be of sufficient interest to readers of this Journal to justify a brief summary of Poincare’s version (assuming Nietzsche’s to be already familiar). 2 One of the major objectives of eighteenth-century mathematical physics had been to prove that the stability of the solar system is a consequence of Newton’s laws of motion. By the beginning of the nineteenth century this goal had apparently been reached by the work of such scientists as Lagrange, Laplace, and Joe Krueger,”

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