Morality in a Technological World

Lorenzo Magnani, philosopher and cognitive scientist, is a Professor at the University of Pavia, Italy, and the Director of its Computational Philosophy Laboratory. He has taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at the City University of New York and currently directs international research programs in the EU, USA, and China. His books Abduction, Reason, and Science (Plenum/Kluwer, New York, 2001) and Philosophy of Geometry (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2001) have become well-respected works in the field of human cognition and epistemology. In 1998, he started the series of International Conferences on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR). The last book Morality in a Technological World Knowledge as a Duty (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007) develops a philosophical and cognitive theory of the relationships between ethics and technology in a naturalistic perspective.

• 1. Respecting people as things; 2. Treating people as means; 3. Hybrid people, hybrid selves; 4. Knowledge as duty; 5. Freedom and responsibility; 6. Creating ethics; 7. Inferring reasons.

Review of the hardback: '[Morality in a Technological World] is a masterpiece. It is completely innovative. It will change argumentation in several branches of cognitive science forever.' Michael Leyton, Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, Rutgers University