Professor Luciano Floridi

Luciano Floridi, Ph.D. is Research Chair in Philosophy of Information, Department of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, Coordinator, GPI, University of Hertfordshire, Fellow, St Cross College, University of Oxford, Coordinator, IEG, University of Oxford, and President, International Association for Computing and Philosophy.
 
Luciano is one of the most influential thinkers in the fields of philosophy of technology and ethics. He is best known for his pioneering work on two new areas of philosophical research, which he has contributed to establish: the philosophy of information and information ethics. His works have been translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is the first philosopher ever to be awarded the Gauss Professorship by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. In 2008, Ethics and Information Technology, Springer, published a special issue in two numbers dedicated to his work.
 
He is Member of the Executive Board of the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT), Area editor (computing and information) of Synthese, Associate editor (philosophy of information) of The Information Society, and Member of the Editorial Boards of Ethics and Information Technology, Minds and Machines, International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction, Telematics & Informatics, and Identity in the Information Society.
 
According to Luciano, it is necessary to develop a constructionist philosophy, where design, modeling, and implementation replace analysis and dissection. Shifting from one set of tasks to the other, philosophy could then stop retreating into the increasingly small corner of its self-sustaining investigations, and hence reacquire a wider view about what really matters. Slowly, he has come to characterize his constructionist philosophy as an innovative field, now known as the philosophy of information, the new area of research that has emerged from the computational/informational turn.
 
Luciano approaches the philosophy of information from two perspectives:

• the purely theoretical perspective provided by logic and epistemology, and
• the technical perspective provided by computer science, IT and Humanities Computing.

For example, in the Preface of Philosophy and Computing, published in 1999, he wrote that the book was meant for two kinds of philosophy students: those who need to acquire some IT literacy in order to use computers efficiently, and those who may be interested in acquiring the background knowledge indispensable for developing a critical understanding of our digital age and hence beginning to work on that would-be branch of philosophy, the philosophy of information, which he hoped may one day become part of Philosophia Prima. Since then, PI, or PCI (Philosophy of Computing and Information), has become his major research interest.
 
Luciano edited Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions and The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, and authored Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (American Classical Studies), and Skepticism and the Foundation of Epistemology: A Study in the Metalogical Fallacies (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History).
 
His papers include What is the Philosophy of Information?, Information Ethics: On the Philosophical Foundation of Computer Ethics, On the Morality of Artificial Agents, Is Semantic Information Meaningful Data?, The Method of Abstraction, On the Intrinsic Value of Information Objects and the Infosphere, Outline of a Theory of Strongly Semantic Information, Information Ethics: An Environmental Approach to the Digital Divide, Mapping the foundationalist debate in computer ethics, Two Approaches to the Philosophy of Information, and The Tragedy of the Digital Commons.
 
He studied at Rome University La Sapienza (Laurea, first class with distinction, 1988), where he was originally educated as a historian of philosophy. He soon became interested in analytic philosophy and wrote his tesi di laurea (MA dissertation) for Rome University La Sapienza in philosophy of logic, on Michael Dummett’s anti-realism. He obtained his MPhil (1989) and Ph.D. degree (1990) from the University of Warwick, UK working in epistemology and philosophy of logic with Susan Haack (who was his PhD supervisor) and Michael Dummett.
 
Read his blog! Watch What is Bioinformation?, Artificial Evil and the Foundation of Computer Ethics, A Look into the Future of ICT, and Relevant Information, the SIRLS/Thomson Scientific ISI Samuel Lazarow Memorial lecture.