Abstract
Our world is technological. According to a longstanding philosophical tradition, the conceptual core of technology can be understood as being based on the relation between two main philosophical categories: the subject and the object (e.g. the relation between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’). This tradition mainly conceives technology as a set of means that can be used to control and manipulate nature (the object), in order to achieve some end (culture) established by human beings (the subject). Consequent to the ICT revolution, this scenario must now be devised in terms of an informational world or environment. This requires a change of paradigm in the study of technology and in the comprehension of our world that displaces the presumed ‘central’ role of the subject. This happens in ways and for motives that have nothing to do with the philosophical hitches that ensue from the post-modern relativistic or nihilistic death of the subject. In the present chapter, we expound the meaning of this scenario, by focusing our attention upon the informational nature of the environment in which we live and act.
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- 1.
I. Kant, Critique of pure reason [1781], trans. N. Kemp Smith, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, 2003, p. 42.
- 2.
See Kant 1992, 395.
- 3.
For criticism and discussion of the issue at stake see, for instance, Himma 2004, Capurro 2008, Brey 2008, Doyle 2010. In the present book, we cannot address each criticism analytically, which would take too much space and Floridi has already taken on the task in several articles and books. Instead, we try to treat and discuss any critical points in more general terms, in order to provide the reader with a broad conceptual framework of Floridi’s approach to ethical issues.
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Durante, M. (2017). The Informational Environment. In: Ethics, Law and the Politics of Information . The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1150-8_2
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