Books
- Susan G. Sterrett, Wittgenstein Flies A Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World
(Fall, 2005), Pi Press (Penguin Group imprint) (Appeared December 2005.) [net].
(last updated on 2009/01/21)
Abstract: Wittgenstein told friends on many occasions that he came
to see how things in the world can be represented in
language by thinking about scale models, and that it
occurred while he was a soldier, in the autumn of 1914.
This book is the result of asking: what if he meant,
experimental engineering scale models? It is well known
that Wittgenstein had been an aeronautical engineer
before going to Cambridge to study philosophy with
Bertrand Russell in 1911. Why only in 1914, then, did this
insight occur? It so happens 1914 was the year that the
basis of the method was formulated, by a
philosophically-minded physicist, as a matter of a purely
logical principle about any symbolic system that is used to
represent physical relationships. In fact, a whole array of
discussions about similarity arose in 1913-1914, in
physics, biology, and chemistry. This book lays out this
previously untold story in the history of ideas, presents a
new reading of Wittgenstein's philosophical work
(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and explains how many
heretofore puzzling claims in it click into a coherent
account on this new reading.
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