As an iconic object, the kite has a lot to do with poetics and philosophy, not just engineering and science. The Chinese credit the philosopher, Mo Tzu, with inventing the kite. “Wing is the corporeal element closest to the Divine”, according to Plato. George Pocock in effect discovered the Philosophers Stone when as a child he watched a stone drawn along by his toy kite and “wondered” Perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, trained as an aeronautical engineer and conducted technical kite research, developing pragmatist concepts like “configurations in configuration space” from aviation techne.
“In 255 B.C.E., Mo Tzu made a wooden kite which took three years to complete. It could indeed fly, but after one day’s trial it was wrecked.”
The sort of philosophy given by two millennia of kite experience is consistently what is now classed as pragmatic instrumentalism, a knowledge-based skill-based humanist animism.
As Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy was different if not opposite to Husserl’s phenomenology, it would be interesting to know the philosophical and mathematical path of Ludwig towards the kite.
By the reverse, I saw an example of an application of some phenomenological concepts: for US design patent the applicant must present several views, then the reader makes a noetico-noematic synthesis by assembling the views in his head, knowing that seeing fully any object is not possible.
I agree that a philosophical “Analysis” category would be better.
Kite-tech led Wittgenstein to Russel and Husserl, as Analytic Philosophy was born. Husserl did foundational work in Predicate Calculus, which is ultimately a way to code AWES AI meta-logic. I read Wittgenstein Flies a Kite a few years ago, and his experience in the late Golden Age of Kites, as Aeronautical Engineering futurism fully blossomed, inspired him accordingly.
To organize my thoughts in 2007 at KiteShip, I pseudo-coded kite-logic in CycL, an extended predicate calculus developed in Austin by Cycorp. Here is a predicate calculus primer-
Still unable to delete this topic. Moving topics by Moderator action seems to break that capability. This post reply also being held up by software imposed delay. Very poor features.
The relation of engineering to philosophy is serious, and kite technology especially so. Unable to delete this Philosophy topic from Lounge; Moderation has fully hijacked it.
Authors have moral rights to withdraw work when editing or moderation is unsuitable.
Intended follow-up posts further relating choice engineering-science analytic philosophy to kite techne (ie. Euler, Etzler, Heidegger) will not be posted here.
