Steps Forward in the Philosophy of Information

There is always much to learn when bright colleagues devote time and energy to evaluating one’s own work carefully. The previous issue of Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics offers a clear example of such an opportunity. The seven articles, constituting the Symposium on my book, The Philosophy of Information, cover a very wide spectrum of topics, insightfully and interestingly. They are very welcome steps forward in the development of the philosophy of information, not least because they make the latter much less a label for my own work and much more the name of an independent program of research, to which I have contributed. There is no space (and if there were, the exercise would be too tedious for the reader anyway) to detail all the lessons that I hope I might have learnt by reading them. So, what I shall do in this short article is to highlight some of the key points that I found most valuable. They are not the only ones, and other readers, or indeed the authors of the articles, may disagree on my selection; but they should offer a good sample of the stimulating contents to be found in the Symposium. I shall proceed by grouping the articles together not in terms of order of publication, but in terms of comments that I shall offer about them.