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Philosophical Conceptions of Information

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Formal Theories of Information

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5363))

Abstract

I love information upon all subjects that come in my way, and especially upon those that are most important.

Thus boldly declares Euphranor, one of the defenders of Christian faith in Berkley’s Alciphron (Berkeley, (1732), Dialogue 1, Section 5, Paragraph 6/10). Evidently, information has been an object of philosophical desire for some time, well before the computer revolution, Internet or the dot.com pandemonium (see for example Dunn (2001) and Adams (2003)). Yet what does Euphranor love, exactly? What is information? The question has received many answers in different fields. Unsurprisingly, several surveys do not even converge on a single, unified definition of information (see for example Braman 1989, Losee (1997), Machlup and Mansfield (1983), Debons and Cameron (1975), Larson and Debons (1983)).

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  1. University of Hertfordshire, UK

    Luciano Floridi

  2. University of Oxford, UK

    Luciano Floridi

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  1. Department of Informatics, University of Fribourg, Boulevard de PĂ©rolles 90, CH-1700, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Giovanni Sommaruga

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Floridi, L. (2009). Philosophical Conceptions of Information. In: Sommaruga, G. (eds) Formal Theories of Information. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5363. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00659-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00659-3_2

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