Thursday, May 06, 2004
Sofia asked me why I started the Ereignis web site.
It was mainly to learn about the web and how to use HTML, back in 1995. I learn practical things best by doing, rather than reading about them, so I decided to create a website that people would find useful, so that they would use it, and give me feedback, so I could improve it, and learn some more.
At first I considered creating a site about the best band out there, but I found there were already several sites on The Fall, and Nick Cave was well covered by several web sites. I had always been interested in philosophy, so I looked into philosophy web sites, and discovered that the only philosophy web sites listed on Yahoo (the web's table of contents in 1995) were a couple about Ayn Rand and one for Rajneesh. The field was wide open.
I decided to narrow the scope of the web site to something I could do a decent job for. I had more books by or about Sartre than any other philosopher, but my interest in him had peaked years earlier, and I was finding that Wittgenstein and Heidegger had asked more interesting questions; and I had more on the latter. I searched for anything related to Heidegger and found a handful of papers that people had posted on ftp sites. The internet already had ftp sites for sharing documents before the web came along, and several ftp files were accessible through web browsers. Using the search engine of the day (Alta Vista) I found hundreds of pages with the word heidegger, but only a few were about the philsopher, and some pages were in languages I could not read. I collected the links to the pages on Martin Heidegger in English, turned the list into a web page, signed up for a web hosting account on webcom.com, and posted the list as Ereignis.html. Since then it's grown to hunddreds of links, and I added pages with additional information.
I named the site Ereignis because in German it means "event" (Heidegger had his own understanding) and I understood visiting a web page as an event. The web is not static, it changes over time, and a page appearing in a browser is a unique event. Dasein was another option for a page on Heidegger, but it didn't sound right as the name of a web site. I didn't want to call it "The Heidegger Home Page" because that seemed too presumptive. Any day someone that understood Heidegger better could do a better job, and then having a site presuming to be Heidegger's "home page" would ring wrong. So Ereignis it was. Years later, when webcom.com was re-org'd into another internet company, I was required to get a domain name for the site. By then ereignis.com was already taken, so I had to settle for beyng.com. ¶ 4:31 PM
At first I considered creating a site about the best band out there, but I found there were already several sites on The Fall, and Nick Cave was well covered by several web sites. I had always been interested in philosophy, so I looked into philosophy web sites, and discovered that the only philosophy web sites listed on Yahoo (the web's table of contents in 1995) were a couple about Ayn Rand and one for Rajneesh. The field was wide open.
I decided to narrow the scope of the web site to something I could do a decent job for. I had more books by or about Sartre than any other philosopher, but my interest in him had peaked years earlier, and I was finding that Wittgenstein and Heidegger had asked more interesting questions; and I had more on the latter. I searched for anything related to Heidegger and found a handful of papers that people had posted on ftp sites. The internet already had ftp sites for sharing documents before the web came along, and several ftp files were accessible through web browsers. Using the search engine of the day (Alta Vista) I found hundreds of pages with the word heidegger, but only a few were about the philsopher, and some pages were in languages I could not read. I collected the links to the pages on Martin Heidegger in English, turned the list into a web page, signed up for a web hosting account on webcom.com, and posted the list as Ereignis.html. Since then it's grown to hunddreds of links, and I added pages with additional information.
I named the site Ereignis because in German it means "event" (Heidegger had his own understanding) and I understood visiting a web page as an event. The web is not static, it changes over time, and a page appearing in a browser is a unique event. Dasein was another option for a page on Heidegger, but it didn't sound right as the name of a web site. I didn't want to call it "The Heidegger Home Page" because that seemed too presumptive. Any day someone that understood Heidegger better could do a better job, and then having a site presuming to be Heidegger's "home page" would ring wrong. So Ereignis it was. Years later, when webcom.com was re-org'd into another internet company, I was required to get a domain name for the site. By then ereignis.com was already taken, so I had to settle for beyng.com. ¶ 4:31 PM
