For Paul Virilio, the accident as a philosophical idea tracks back to Aristotle, who in his Metaphysics conceived of it as a property which has no necessary connection to the substance of a thing. So, a plane crash is a chance event which interrupts the inevitable spread of air travel around the world. Virilio deconstructs Aristotle to claim that the accident – or, at least, an accident waiting to happen – is always the necessary property of a thing. So, when a jet airliner like the Boeing 777 is invented, the potential for a complex event like the disappearance of Flight MH370 is also created. Here, Virilio comes close to the atomist physics of Lucretius, who argues that a complex event is the result of an infinitesimal deviation in spacetime, much like the swerve-off course which Malaysian military radar revealed Flight MH370 had taken before it disappeared. For the relationship to nonlinear dynamics, see http://fractalontology.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/notes-on-the-birth-of-physics/
Flight MH370 considered as a metaphysical event
Created on
23 March 2014, 23:47, by
Steve Beard