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"What is your aim in philosophy? -- To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ยง309)
Does anyone know anything about fly bottles? I gather from the first couple of chapters of Jonathan Weiner's 'Time, Love, Memory' (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) that they're a bit of scientific equipment used to study fruit flies, but I get the impression that the term is also used of a particular kind of household insect trap.
Its been claimed in some of the reviews of David Egan's play 'The Fly Bottle' (which includes Wittgenstein) that the term refers to "a practice followed by Viennese pub keepers of sticking empty beer bottles upside down under the bar which would cause flies to fly into the bottle to g [sic] backward to get out." (http://www.curtainup.com/flybottle.html). I'm a bit suspicious though, and would like to see a source for this... |
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