Dr. Luciano Floridi was interviewed by Laureano Ralon on May 22th, 2011 as part of the Figure/Ground Communication scholarly interview series.
Luciano Floridi was born in Rome in 1964. He was educated at Rome University La Sapienza, where he graduated in philosophy (laurea) in 1988, first class with distinction. He obtained his MPhil in 1989 and PhD degree in 1990, both from the University of Warwick. He was lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick in 1990-1. He joined the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Oxford in 1990 and the OUCL (Oxford’s Department of Computer Science) in 1999. He was Junior Research Fellow (postdoc) in Philosophy at Wolfson College, Oxford University in 1990-4, Francis Yates Fellow in the History of Ideas at the Warburg Institute, University of London in 1994–95, and Research Fellow in Philosophy at Wolfson College, Oxford University in 1994-01. During these years in Oxford, he held several lecturerships in different Colleges. Between 1994 and 1996, he also held a post-doctoral research scholarship at the Department of Philosophy, Università degli Studi di Torino. Between 2001 and 2006, he was Markle Foundation Senior Research Fellow in Information Policy at the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, Oxford University. Between 2002 and 2008, he was Associate Professor of Logic (tenure) at the Università degli Studi di Bari. In 2006, he was elected Fellow by Special Election of St Cross College, Oxford University. Between 2006 and 2010, he was President of IACAP (International Association for Computing And Philosophy). In 2009, he became the first philosopher to be elected Gauss Professor by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. Still in 2009, he was awarded the Barwise Prize by the American Philosophical Association in recognition of his research on the philosophy of information, and was elected Fellow of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. In 2010, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Springer’s new journal Philosophy & Technology and elected Fellow of the Center for Information Policy Research, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Since 2008, he is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire – where he holds the Research Chair in Philosophy of Information and the UNESCO Chair of Information and Computer Ethics – and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford, where he is the founder and director of the IEG, Oxford University Information Ethics research Group. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project “The Construction of Personal Identities Online” and of the Marie Curie Fellowship Grant on “The Ethics of Information Warfare: Risks, Rights and Responsibilities” (FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF). Floridi’s research concerns primarily the Philosophy of Information and Information Ethics. Other research interests include Epistemology, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Technology, and the History and Philosophy of Scepticism. He has published over a hundred articles in these areas, in many anthologies and in such peer-reviewed journals asArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Erkenntnis, Ethics and Information Technology, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Journal of the History of Ideas, Metaphilosophy, Minds and Machines, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Social Epistemology, Synthese, The Information Society, and Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie. His works have been translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Japanese, Hungarian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.
