Lorenzo Magnani, philosopher and cognitive scientist, is a professor at the University of Pavia, Italy, and the director of its Computational Philosophy Laboratory. He is visiting professor at the Sun Yat-sen University, Canton (Guangzhou), China. He has taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at The City University of New York and currently directs international research programs in the EU, USA, and China. His book Abduction, Reason, and Science (New York, 2001) has become a well-respected work in the field of human cognition. The recent book Morality in a Technological World (Cambridge, 2007) develops a philosophical and cognitive theory of the relationships between ethics and technology in a naturalistic perspective. The book Abductive Cognition. The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical reasoning has been published by Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York (2009). The last book Understanding Violence. Morality, Religion, and Violence Intertwined: A Philosophical Stance has also been published by Springer in 2011, In 1998 he started the series of International Conferences on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR). Since 2011 he is the editor of the Book Series Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics (SAPERE), Springer, Heidelberg/Berlin.