Luciano Floridi

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**Luciano Floridi**
Luciano Floridi at CAP Conference
Date of birth:	16 November 1964
Place of birth:	Rome, Italy
Influenced by:	Sextus Empiricus, Descartes, Kant, Neo-Kantianism, Analytic Philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce, Wittgenstein, Michael Dummett, Susan Haack

Luciano Floridi (Laurea, University of Rome La Sapienza, M.Phil. and Ph.D. University of Warwick, M.A. University of Oxford) is one of Italy's most influential thinkers in the area of science, technology, and ethics. ^[1] He is best known for his research on the sceptical tradition and for being the founder of the philosophy of information and of information ethics, two fields that he has established as independent areas of inquiry in the nineties.

Floridi is Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford and Associate Professor of Logic and Epistemology at the Università degli Studi di Bari. He is the founder and coordinator, with Jeff Sanders, of the IEG, an interdepartmental research group on the philosophy of information at the University of Oxford. He has worked on Humanities Computing and is the founder and director of SWIF, an Italian philosophy website. In 2006 he was elected President of IACAP, the International Association for Computing And Philosophy, of which he was Vice President between 2003 and 2006. His works have been translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Persian, Polish and Portuguese.

1 Early career
2 Philosophy
3 Books
4 iPod and Videos
5 External links
6 Notes

[edit] Early career

As an undergraduate in Rome, he was originally educated as a classicist and a historian of philosophy. He soon became interested in analytic philosophy and wrote his tesi di laurea (MA thesis) for Rome University La Sapienza in philosophy of logic, on Michael Dummett's anti-realism. In the UK, first at the University of Warwick and then at the University of Oxford, he worked in philosophy of logic and epistemology with Susan Haack (who was his PhD supervisor) and Michael Dummett. During his graduate and postdoctoral years, he moved across the standard topics in analytic philosophy in search of a new methodology, to approach contemporary problems from a perspective that would be heuristically powerful and intellectually enriching when dealing with lively philosophical issues. During his graduate studies, he began to distance himself from classic analytic philosophy. In his view, the analytic movement had lost its propelling force and was a retreating paradigm. For this reason, he worked on pragmatism (especially Peirce) and foundationalist issues in epistemology).

In his first book, Scepticism and the Foundation of Epistemology, he was already looking for a concept of subject-independent knowledge close to what he now identifies as semantic information. During his postdoctoral studies, as a Junior Research Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, he begun to embrace a more Neo-Kantian philosophy, which led him to spend one academic year in Marburg, where he focussed on Ernest Cassirer's version of Neo-Kantianism. He begun working exclusively on what is now known as the philosophy of information during his years as Research Fellow, still at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.

[edit] Philosophy

According to Floridi, it is necessary to develop a constructionist philosophy, where design, modelling 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 re-acquire a wider view about what really matters. Slowly, Floridi has come to characterise 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.

Floridi 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.

Floridi's perspective is that there is a need for a broader concept of information processing and flowing, which includes computation, but not only computation. This new framework provides a very robust theoretical frame within which to place and make sense of the different lines of research that have taken shape since the fifties. The second advantage is PI’s diachronic perspective, a perspective on the development of philosophy through time. In his view, PI gives us a much wider and more profound perspective on what philosophy might have actually been doing.

Currently, Floridi is working on two areas of research: computer ethics (see the entry information ethics) and the concept of information.

[edit] Books

Augmented Intelligence — A Guide to IT for Philosophers. (in Italian) Rome: Armando, 1996.
Scepticism and the Foundation of Epistemology - A Study in the Metalogical Fallacies. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
Internet - An Epistemological Essay. (in Italian and in French) Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997.
Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction. London/New York: Routledge, 1999.
Sextus Empiricus, The Recovery and Transmission of Pyrrhonism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information. (editor) Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

[edit] iPod and Videos

Relevant Information, the SIRLS/Thomson Scientific ISI Samuel Lazarow Memorial lecture, University of Arizona, USA, February 8 2007. View the Presentation while you listen to the podcast. Download Lecture (MP3, 52MB). Download Question and Answer Session following the Lecture (MP3, 39MB). Quicktime Streaming Video (requires the Quicktime Plug-in, broadband recommended). Windows Video (.wmv format, requires IE and Media Player version 9 or higher for streaming). iPod Compatible (.m4v, 375MB, download only).