Luciano Floridi

Luciano Floridi (born in Rome in 1964) is an Italian philosopher who has worked for many years within the British academic world. His work belongs to the analytic tradition and focuses on the nature of information. He is best known for his contributions to the philosophy of information and to information ethics, two fields he helped to define. His importance lies in bridging classical logic and epistemology with the questions raised by digital society.

He graduated from La Sapienza in 1988, having first been trained as a historian of philosophy before turning to analytic philosophy. His thesis dealt with Michael Dummett's anti-realism. He then earned a master's degree and a doctorate at the University of Warwick, in 1989 and 1990, and went on to work at Warwick, Oxford and Bari. He led research groups on the philosophy of information at Oxford and Hertfordshire, where he held a research chair between 2008 and 2013. In his view, the analytic movement had lost its momentum, and his first book, Scepticism and the Foundation of Epistemology (1996), sought a new foundation for epistemology.

His central proposal is the philosophy of information, which treats information not as a neutral picture of reality but as part of the world, with properties and effects of its own. This framework includes an ontology, an epistemology, a logic and an ethics of information, and it introduces the notion of the infosphere: the physical, social and cultural environment in which information is produced, used and shared. From this base he defends a minimalist, non-anthropocentric ethics that values existence more than life and covers both biological and non-biological entities. He also advocates a constructionist philosophy in which designing and building models matters as much as analysis.

His works include Internet: An Epistemological Essay (1997), Philosophy and Computing (1999) and The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information (2003), as well as The Fourth Revolution, which has been translated into many languages. His influence extends to the regulation of artificial intelligence. In 2018 he led the team that drafted an early ethical framework for good AI, and he is considered one of the promoters of the recent EU AI Act. He currently directs the Yale Digital Ethics Center. His theories are also studied in libraries and documentation centres, especially in universities.