Luciano Floridi's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

The Republic: The Influential Classic

Plato

4.2

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 intellectu

Recommended by Bryan Van Norden, David Heinemeier Hansson, Jonathan Glover, and 6 others.

Luciano Floridi

When it comes to the classic image of the myth of the cave, you can reinterpret the whole thing today in terms of the channel of communication and information theory. [source]

Bryan Van Norden

It’s very readable even if you aren’t a professional philosopher. Take the story of ‘The Ring of Gyges,’ which raises the question of whether you would continue to act like a good person if you had a ring of invisibility that let you get away with doing whatever you wanted to do. That’s a fascinating thought experiment that anybody can appreciate. [source]

David Heinemeier Hansson

I’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 accessible. It’s fun to see the lines that continue from a book like this to the considerations of the Stoics all the way to Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations and then onto a modern critique and history in that Debt: First 5,000 Years. A conversation spanning millennia. [source]

2

Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies

René Descartes

4.2

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 de

Recommended by Dallas Denery, Luciano Floridi, Nigel Warburton, and 1 others.

Luciano Floridi

Today Descartes speaks more directly to us if you understand him as the equivalent of an engineer testing a product. [source]

Dallas Denery

Descartes wants a God that doesn’t speak, because speaking is tantamount to interfering with the orderly and law-like operations of the world. [source]

Nigel Warburton

René Descartes is a superb writer who, in his first Meditation (which is the one I’m recommending) takes skepticism—which is an unwillingness to assume anything, a philosophical stance where you question everything—about as far as it can go. Meditations is written as if he is going through a process in real time, he’s imagining himself sitting by a fire taking all the thoughts that he’s had in his past, the different ways of acquiring information, cross-questioning himself about whether he could have been deceived about any of those, and employing what’s come to be known as ‘Cartesian Doubt’. It’s not taking as true anything about which there is the slightest possible doubt. In ordinary life, that’s not a way to behave. [source]

3

Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer, et al.

4.2

'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 o

Recommended by Adrian Moore, Luciano Floridi, and Simon Blackburn.

Luciano Floridi

I 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]

Adrian Moore

This is the greatest philosophical book of all time. This is Kant’s masterpiece. [source]

Simon Blackburn

An illuminating way to think of the Critique is as a kind of prolonged wrestling match with Hume. [source]

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4

The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life Plus the Secrets of Eni

Alan Mathison Turing

3.9

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

Recommended by Luciano Floridi.

Luciano Floridi

The 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 the paper. What he did say is that because this question doesn’t provide the conditions of possibility for an answer – because we don’t know what ‘think’ is, and we don’t even know what a ‘machine’ is – we can’t answer it. But we can run a test and if you can’t see a difference between the answers of a human and a machine, then the machine has passed the test. So what Turing tells us is that you need to be clear about the level of abstraction at which your discussion is taking place. Unfortunately ‘level of abstraction’ has a technical sense in computer science which is often misunderstood in philosophy because there are no levels – levels of abstraction don’t come in a hierarchy. If you look at a house, you can look at it from the perspective of the owners, the council, economic, a lawyer’s perspective – these are all different levels of abstraction. In the Turing test, the level of abstraction is provided by the questioning game and the comparison of the two players at the level of their abilities to understand questions and answer them meaningfully. [source]

5

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Jean-Francois Lyotard, G. Bennington

4.2

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,

Recommended by Luciano Floridi.

Luciano Floridi

There’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]