Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World

While numerous critical studies have traced Wittgenstein's philosophy of language to his study of mathematics and logic under Bertrand Russell, Sterrett, professor of philosophy at Duke, bases this novel intellectual history on the assiduously researched and surprising idea that Wittgenstein's advances in logic and the philosophy of language were related to another early 20th-century invention: the airplane. Weaving together the history of ideas in fin-de-siècle Austria, Germany, England and the United States, Sterrett deftly demonstrates that Wittgenstein drew the inspiration for his groundbreaking Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1914) from theories of physics and of music. She traces his influences to physicists like Ludwig Boltzmann and Edgar Buckingham, as well as his own study of the gramophone and the sound waves it produced. Sterrett draws on Wittgenstein's early aeronautical research and experiences building kites, asserting that the philosopher of language used models of wings as a model of language. Much like scale models of propellers or other toys, he said, language represents facts as we perceive and imagine them. Although often mired in dense, labyrinthine prose, Sterrett's compelling history of ideas offers a new glimpse of this perennially difficult philosopher and his intellectual milieu. (Dec.)