Cyclic Thought: The Persistence of Recurrence Across Cosmological Paradigms

This paper examines the historical persistence of recurrence as a conceptual problem in Western cosmology from antiquity to modern physics. Rather than treating determinism and cosmic recurrence as competing metaphysical conclusions, the study argues that recurrence repeatedly reemerges when dominant cosmological paradigms confront their explanatory limits. Beginning with Aristotle’s account of eternal motion and proceeding through Thomas Aquinas’s theological synthesis, Newtonian mechanics, Enlightenment determinism, thermodynamics, relativity, and contemporary cyclic models, the paper demonstrates that cosmological theories are shaped by inherited constraints on time, causality, and necessity. Modern cyclic cosmologies do not represent a radical break from earlier thought but a reformulation of enduring structural tensions under new mathematical and physical conditions. Recurrence, therefore, functions less as a physical doctrine than as a historically conditioned pressure point within cosmological reasoning.