Luciano Floridi

From Wikipedia

Luciano Floridi

Luciano Floridi (born Rome 1964, Laurea, University of Rome La Sapienza, M.Phil. and Ph.D. University of Warwick, M.A. University of Oxford), Italian philosopher at the University of Oxford, best known for his research on the sceptical tradition and for his foundational work on the philosophy of information and on information ethics, two fields that he has contributed to establish.

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, the 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, the Italian Web Site for Philosophy. He is 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.

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, with a thesis 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 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 started distancing 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 Margurg, where he studied especially Ernest Cassirer's version of Neo-Kantianism. He begun working exclusively on what is now know as the philosophy of information during his years as Research Fellow, still at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.

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 this constructionist philosophy as an innovative field, now known as the philosophy of information, the new area of research that has emerged from the computational 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 us with 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.

[سمادول] 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.

[سمادول] External links

• Home page and articles online
• Interview for the American Philosophical Association — Philosophy And Computing Newsletter
• Biography, in English
• Biography, in Italian, from Cervelli in Fuga (Rome: Accenti, 2001)
• Where are we in the philosophy of information? The Bergen podcast
• Floridi's Information Ethics, video of a workshop at NA-CAP