Luciano Floridi, a philosopher and fellow at Oxford University, will speak on The Philosophy of Information.

Abstract:
The information society has its scientific roots in the invention of writing, but it became a reality only thanks to the enormous military funding available during WWII and the Cold War. Its development acquired its momentum in the seventies, when PCs started to be sold like ordinary commodities, but it finally became a macroscopic phenomenon only at the end of the eighties, when the Internet and then the Web begun to transform computers into terminals. This explains why philosophers have just recently begun to address the new intellectual challenges that arise from the world of information. The result of their investigations has been the emergence of a new and vitally important area of research, what I have defined the philosophy of information (PI). In this talk, I shall present the foundations of PI, its methods and challenges, and look at what lies ahead.