Rethinking Legal Personhood in the Infosphere: Jurisprudential Reflections on Luciano Floridi’s Fourth Revolution

Abstract

The evolution of the Infosphere, as articulated in Luciano Floridi’s Fourth 
Revolution, compels a fundamental reconsideration of legal personhood 
through the lens of classical jurisprudence. Rooted in the Roman concept of persona—initially denoting social status and legal capacity—the legal person has historically evolved within metaphysical debates between realism and nominalism, natural law and positivism, and rationalist Enlightenment anthropology. Floridi's informational metaphysics disrupts this anthropocentric lineage, proposing a reontologization of the self and the emergence of inforgs informational organisms—who participate in an expanded moral and ontological community. This paper critically interrogated the adequacy of classical legal theories from Aquinas’s teleological ethics to Kelsen’s Pure Theory, and Hart’s secondary rules in accommodating non-human agents within the framework of legal subjectivity. Must personhood, traditionally reserved for moral agents capable of will and reason (ratio etvoluntas), now extend to entities defined by relational data structures, algorithmic intentionality, and distributed agency? The analysis using doctrinal method, evaluated normative thresholds for personhood—capacity for rights, duties, and juridical recognition against the challenge of AI systems, synthetic minds, and 
autonomous digital agents. Rather than abandoning the classical edifice, the paper proposed a principled reconstitution: a reconceptualization of persona under the jurisprudence of the Infosphere. This entails harmonizing Aristotelian-Thomistic substance ontology with Floridian informational ontology to forge a coherent legal response to emerging digital realities. Such a synthesis is indispensable for AI governance, algorithmic justice, and rethinking sovereignty in the Fourth Revolution.