Administration

Dr. in Philosophy from Düsseldorf University

Rafael Capurro is a Uruguayan philosopher and pioneer of the field of information ethics.

He was Professor of information management and information ethics at Stuttgart Media University in Germany from 1986 to 2009. He was lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy, Stuttgart University from 1989 to 2004. From 2000 to 2010, he was a member of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) to the European Commission. Capurro is the founder of the International Center for Information Ethics, the Capurro-Fiek Foundation, and co-founder of the Africa Network for Information Ethics. He also founded and served as editor-in-chief of the IRIE Journal from 2004 to 2018 and was an academic advisor to the Institute of Philosophy and Technology in Athens, Greece. In 2020, he was honored with the INSEIT/Joseph Weizenbaum Award in Information and Computer
Ethics.

Capurro was born in 1945 in Montevideo, Uruguay. He studied humanities in Chile and has a degree in Philosophy from Colegio Máximo, Universidad del Salvador (Buenos Aires, Argentina 1971). He studied documentation at the Institute for Documentation Education (LID) (Frankfurt am Main) between 1972 and 73 and has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Düsseldorf (1978), as well as a qualification in practical philosophy from the University of Stuttgart (1989).

He was advisor to the general director of FIZ Karlsruhe between 1980 and 1985 and Professor of Information Science and Information Ethics at the University of Media (HdM) between 1986 and 2009. He also served as Private Professor of practical philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Stuttgart between 1989 and 2004.

In 1999 he founded the International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) and served as a Member of the European Commission’s European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) from 2000 to 2010, with a new mandate since 2016. He was also a Member of the Center for Information Policy Research, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA from 2008 to 2010, Member of the International Institute of Hermeneutics (IIH) and Senior Fellow of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba in Japan from 2015 to 2017. He served as Emeritus Member of the ID4Africa Advisory Board between 2014 and 2018 and Member of the Advisory Board for Corporate Integrity and Responsibility at Daimler AG between May 2016 and July 2017. He was also a Member of the advisory board for digital transformation of AOK Nordost in 2016 and 2017. In addition, he has been a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Digital Ethics (IDE), University of Media (HdM) since 2014.

In 2004 he founded the International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE) of which he was Editor-in-Chief from 2004 to 2018. He is a Research Associate at the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa and Academic Advisor at the Institute of Philosophy and Technology. He is a member of the research group Philosophical Perspectives on Information (Perfil-i) of the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Ibict) and a member of the Information and Communication Ethics Group (Getinco) of the Faculty of Information and Communication of the University of the Republic (Uruguay).