I recently started reading Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Aesthetics. The third proposition reads:

An intelligent way of dividing up a book on philosophy would be into parts of speech, kinds of words. Where in fact you would have to distinguish far more parts of speech than an ordinary grammar does. You would talk for hours and hours on the verbs ‘seeing’, ‘feeling’, etc., verbs describing personal experience. We get a peculiar kind of confusion or confusions which comes up with all these words. You would have another chapter on numerals — here there would be another kind of confusion: a chapter on ‘all’, ‘any’, ‘some’, etc. — another kind of confusion: a chapter on ‘you’, ‘I’, etc. — another kind: a chapter on ‘beautiful’, ‘good’ — another kind. We get into a new group of confusions; language plays us entirely new tricks.

It struck me that Wittgenstein’s notion of a philosophical grammar had broad implications for how we organize arbitrary bits of information; in a certain sense, Wittgenstein has proposed a means of encoding that systematizes language without giving short shrift to language’s fluidity.

It’s in that spirit that I wanted to start this blog. If things go well, this will be a place to think about philosophy (especially Wittgenstein) and computer science (especially Ruby). If they don’t go well, this blog will end up like every other blog I’ve meant to start.

So hello, world. Here we go.