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144 Herbert Hrachovec

Two or three philosophy professors, several (graduate) students
and some extra-academic participants had locked into intensive dis-
cussions and were producing considerable output on issues as di-
verse as “Realism and Anti-realism,” “Consciousness,” “Colours and
Sounds,” “Goethe,” and “Bombing Iraq.” This was not, I hasten to
add, Usenet material, but more often than not carefully developed
arguments taking note of other people’s view, civil and enterprising
at the same time. The spirit of the list can probably be best com-
pared to that of “Philosophy and Literature,” a list run at the Uni-
versity of Texas. But philweb had negligible institutional support
and no pre-set agenda to begin with.
There is a certain irony in the fact that Georg Sommer, the
spokesman of philweb, had not envisaged this type of philosophical
discussion and had, in fact, withdrawn from the list at the time it
was more or less reinvented in a new format. It took some adminis-
trative lacunae for the participants to realize that the list’s owner
was not even a member of the list any more. He had to be re-invited
to give his opinion on recent developments. An understanding was
quickly reached: list ownership passed to two of the participants and
it was generally agreed to continue the list as a forum of prolonged
philosophical brainstorming.
Free electronic discourse follows its own somewhat impre-
dictable laws and my guess is that philweb will not be able to main-
tain the impressive quality it had reached at the beginning of 1998.
In this instance, as in the case of give-l, a surprising amount of cog-
nitive energy was in evidence, strangely fused with excitement con-
cerning technologies conveniently supplied by a computer lab. For an
initial stretch of time philosophical activity, generously shared among
the group, is oblivious to doctrines, curricula and grades. Philweb’s
success will quite possibly be short-lived—but what kind of attitude
is at work in such predictions? Mailing lists are, after all, neither
hardcover publications nor traditional social structures. The new
kids articulating themselves on philweb should not be submitted to a
set of criteria taken from quite different institutionalised settings.
They will probably fail to get credits for their efforts, but their exper-
iments in establishing a transitory, digitally distributed verbal agora
cannot fail to affect the future of philosophical scholarship.
The feasibility of quasi-instantaneous, two-way global data
transfer in a public medium evokes, as all of you know, hopes of in-
creasing democratic participation among citizens and within various
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organisations. As this miniature Bildungsroman draws to a close,
one of its lessons is that, unfortunately, at this level of generality the