Experts > Luciano Floridi

Luciano Floridi's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Luciano Floridi recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Luciano Floridi's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Postmodern Condition

A Report on Knowledge

This book explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our post-modernity. Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed. This book extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information is controlled in the Western world. less
Recommended by Luciano Floridi, and 1 others.

Luciano FloridiThere’s an emphasis in Lyotard’s book on the connection between politics and technology, the politics which manipulate and affect technologies and so impact on how we live. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

2
Alan Turing was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. In 1935, aged 22, he developed the mathematical theory upon which all subsequent stored-program digital computers are modeled.
At the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in September 1939, he joined the Government Codebreaking team at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire and played a crucial role in deciphering Engima, the code used by the German armed forces to protect their radio communications. Turing's work on the version of Enigma used by the German navy was vital to the battle for supremacy in the North...
more
Recommended by Luciano Floridi, and 1 others.

Luciano FloridiThe quintessential Turing for philosophy is certainly the Turing test as described in The Imitation Game. The Turing test has in it a Kantian lesson. Sadly, if you look at the Loebner prize, they have a medal that has ‘Can a Machine Think?’ on it. Unfortunately they missed Turing’s answer to that question, which is that it is “too meaningless to deserve discussion.” He didn’t ask that question in... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

3

Critique of Pure Reason

'The purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason consists in the attempt to change the old procedure of metaphysics and to bring about a complete revolution'

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is the central text of modern philosophy. It presents a profound and challenging investigation into the nature of human reason, its knowledge and its illusions. Reason, Kant argues, is the seat of certain concepts that precede experience and make it possible, but we are not therefore entitled to draw conclusions about the natural world from these concepts....
more

Simon BlackburnAn illuminating way to think of the Critique is as a kind of prolonged wrestling match with Hume. (Source)

Adrian MooreThis is the greatest philosophical book of all time. This is Kant’s masterpiece. (Source)

Luciano FloridiI find reading Kant a bit like understanding cricket as a foreigner: hard to get at first, but once you get it, it’s very enjoyable. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

4
Here is a brilliant new translation of Descartes's Meditations, one of the most influential books in the history of Western philosophy, including the full texts of the Third and Fourth Objections and Replies, and a selection from the other exchanges. Discovering his own existence as a thinking entity in the very exercise of doubt--in the famous formulation cogito, ergo sum--Descartes goes on to develop new conceptions of body and mind, capable of serving as foundations for a new science of nature. Subsequent philosophy has grappled with Descartes's ideas, but his arguments... more

Tim CraneDescartes was educated by Jesuits, and it’s important that they were called meditations because they were meant to be things that people would think through themselves. (Source)

Dallas DeneryDescartes wants a God that doesn’t speak, because speaking is tantamount to interfering with the orderly and law-like operations of the world. (Source)

Luciano FloridiToday Descartes speaks more directly to us if you understand him as the equivalent of an engineer testing a product. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

5
The newest deluxe edition in the bestselling Capstone Classics Series This ancient classic has had a make-over. In recent years these Capstone Classic deluxe editions have caught the book buying public's imagination. The volumes of international bestsellers such as Think and Grow Rich and The Art of War have quickly become the market leaders. Now Plato's best known work, one of the most intellectually and historically influential works of philosophy and political theory, has been brought to life in this luxury, hardback, keep-sake edition.

This edition includes:
more

Maria PopovaTim Ferriss: "If you could guarantee that every public official or leader read one book, what would it be?": "The book would be, rather obviously, Plato's The Republic. I'm actually gobsmacked that this isn't required in order to be sworn into office, like the Constitution is required for us American immigrants when it comes time to gain American citizenship." (Source)

Rebecca GoldsteinLiving today in Trump’s America, I am constantly reminded of specific passages in the Republic, most saliently his warnings of how a demagogue might arise in the midst of a democracy by fanning up resentments and fears. (Source)

David Heinemeier HanssonI’m about a third through this and still can’t tell whether Plato is making a mockery of Socrates ideas for the idyllic society or not. So many of the arguments presented as Socrates’ are so tortured and with so disconnected leaps of logic that it’s hard to take it at face value. Yet still, it’s good fun to follow the dialogue. It reads more like a play than a book, and again, immensely... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Don't have time to read Luciano Floridi's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.