A Preface to the Philosophy of Legal Information
Abstract
This article is divided into three parts. Part II describes Floridi's account of the historical horizon of scientific advance as it influences human selfunderstanding-philosophical anthropology. He examines several historical moments that suggest how scientific advances revolutionized philosophical anthropology. Alan Turing, who showed that human beings are not the only creatures who can calculate, and Claude Shannon, who showed that information is a common physical phenomenon, achieved the fourth of these developments. These developments led to new theories of information and to new understandings of human nature and philosophical anthropologies. Part III describes PI. It suggests how PI can reinvigorate traditional philosophical questions, particularly in the areas of ontology, epistemology, and philosophical ethics. Part IV suggests how a PLI might be applied to understand the new condition of law. The final part describes the essential descriptive claims of PLI and examines how PLI can contribute to normative jurisprudence.