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New Kids on the Net 143

Increasing numbers of German-language universities are present
on the Web, offering the usual set of information, including brief
overviews of their departments of philosophy. There are approxi-
mately seventy home pages of philosophy professors, most of them em-
bedded within the general presentation of their institution. Less than
twenty of those home pages contain more than a CV, a list of publica-
tions and a description of past and current interests. Some philosoph-
ical associations like the “Ludwig Wittgenstein Gesellschaft” or the
“Austrian Society for Philosophy” are on-line and a number of pub-
lishing houses as well as academic journals supply electronic cata-
logues and indices. All of this pretty much mirrors the US-American
situation, albeit on a smaller scale. But, turning the attention to coop-
erative projects, there are interesting differences.
With the exception of Vienna University, up to now there have
been next to no attempts to take up the challenge of computer-
mediated philosophy in an institutionalised, academic context. Ger-
man philosophy departments tend to be quite hierarchically
organised, unwilling and unable to quickly adapt to outside pres-
sures and public expectation. On a more conceptual level, most of
the established theoretical frameworks profess a distance towards
mass media and the marketplace of ideas. Experimental electronic
philosophy is, consequently, done by a small group of graduate stu-
dents and people on the fringe of the educational system. The au-
thoritative collection of digital resources in German-language
philosophy is maintained by Dieter Köhler, a graduate student from
14
Heidelberg, in his spare time and one of the most charming sites,
“Annette’s Philosophenstübchen” is an open attempt to challenge
the kind of philosophy usually done in academia. 15 Probably Ger-
many’s most noteworthy contributions to on-line life in philosophy
have been provided by PhilNet, a small group of students very
loosely affiliated with Hamburg University.
I’ll restrict myself to the mailing list initiated by the Hamburg
group in May 1996, incidently on the very same day that I launched
register. After some initial confusions the list-owners reached an
agreement concerning the respective profiles of their lists. Philweb
was to cater for net-users and web-designers interested in applying
new information technology to the field of philosophy. These aims
were in line with several other PhilNet activities, such as building a
philosophical search engine and a text repository. The project had
difficulties in developing: there were few responses and traffic on
philweb had virtually stopped when (in September 1997) the list
suddenly exploded.