Information research, practice, and education continue to invite and benefit from philosophy

It has become easy to make a case for the relevance, richness, and importance of philosophical thinking for information research and practice. The information professions regularly encounter previously unknown and unimagined relations between people and information, and information research very often touches upon the outer boundaries of science and the humanities. Both cases solicit philosophical thinking: the former frequently requires deep, critical thinking about what our relationship to information is and can be, with considerable consequences for the future of human kind and the planet, and the latter invites the same kind of thinkingwhen our assumptions and views are shown to be insufficiently clear to allow confident conclusions and the generation of further knowledge. These domains also support philosophical thinking by providing new examples of philosophical concepts in action, inviting scholars to amend our views and definitions so that they match the information community’s perceptions of the world and gain further practical utility. A similar relationship exists between philosophy and information education. Newly-enrolled students in information science (IS) programs have the benefit of casting fresh eyes on the state of knowledge in various subfields in IS, and so quickly identify the limits of our understanding along various important topics. This often manifests when they begin asking difficult questions in the lecture hall; though the courses in such programs are mainly focused on skill mastery, many unaddressed societal, ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical issues lurk in the background, and students ask about, for example, the nature of information and its relationship to facts, knowledge, and propaganda; the digital divide and the right to information access; the implications of data collection, Web tracking, and the right to be forgotten. These are just a few common examples, each of which has been debated in scholarly literature, and the ties of information to philosophy extend into every subdomain of IS [1]. Such questions are difficult to answer – whether posed in class or in scholarly journals – in part because the concepts are complex, requiring wide and careful reading if one hopes to attempt an informed response. One could easily become lost in or intimidated by the wealth of such literature; looking only to Martens’s introductory