This article argues that annual hours per employed person and per working-age person capture important dimensions of political-economic success that should be weighed against aggregate employment and wealth patterns. It also argues that partisan-driven work-time policies and welfare-regime institutions give rise to diverging Social Democratic, Liberal, and Christian Democratic “worlds” of work time in terms of these two measures. Descriptive statistics for eighteen Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries reveal broad clustering and trends suggestive of the Three Worlds, while (...) panel estimation suggests the influence of partisan and welfare-institutional conditions underlying them. Case study of Finland, the United States, and the Netherlands further illustrates the political process and sequence of the Three Worlds. (shrink)

This volume brings together 13 interviews with some of the brightest names in contemporary philosophy, including W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, as well as John Rawls. Covering a wide range of topics from the philosophy of law and logic to metaphysics to literature, the interviews in this text provide an introduction to some of the most influential thinkers of the day.

Centering on his relationship with Gertrud Bing from 1958 until her death in 1964 — as well as, to a lesser extent, on his relationship with Ernst Gombrich — the author recalls his informal induction during those years into a tradition of thought and an intellectual climate that Aby Warburg had embodied in the Institute and Library that he founded in Hamburg. The Institute is described as existing, during the late 1950s and early 1960s in London, less as a formal (...) institution than as the interaction of some two dozen émigrés with what the author describes as “the intention of the books” and the Library's “frame of mind.” The essay — which is a somewhat revised excerpt from the author's memoir Episodes: A Memorybook (2010) — goes on to detail various habits of classification in the Warburg Library's arrangement and to show how these have entailed assumptions about how the human world works. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Both classical and modern liberals tend to treat freedom of choice as if it is intrinsically valuable—regardless of what is chosen. They fear that treating freedom as, instead, instrumental only to good choices might open the door to paternalism if a polity were to decide that people were making bad choices. A middle course would be to treat freedom as independently valuable. On the one hand, the independent value of freedom does not treat all choices as good as long (...) as they are freely made. On the other hand, it does not reduce the value of freedom to the known, or predictable, good ends to which a free action may be conducive. Following from Hayek’s acknowledgement that we are often ignorant of what the future may hold, freedom may have value because it will allow us to make decisions whose positive consequences cannot now be predicted. (shrink)

The usefulness of models that describe the world lies in their simplicity relative to what they model. But simplification entails inaccuracy, so models should be treated as provisional. Nancy Cartwright's account of science as a modeling exercise, in which fundamental laws hold true only in theory—not in reality, given the complexities of the real world—suggests that Rational Choice Theory (RCT) should not be rejected on the traditional basis of its lack of realism: that, after all, is to be expected of (...) any simulacrum model. But when RCT has been extended to domains, such as politics, in which there is no necessary reason to expect systemic pressures against people who depart too far from the model, RCT is a simulacrum without any particular claim to expressing underlying causal laws. This cautions against the tendency to rest content with models and to treat their assumptions as if they were true. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time thirteen recent interviews with the brightest names in contemporary philosophy, including W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam and John Rawls. The pieces are culled from the Harvard Review of Philosophy, which has operated at the core of Harvard's Philosophy Department since 1991. Covering wide range of topics from the philosophy of law to logic to metaphysics to literature, the interviews provide a fascinating introduction to some of the most influential thinkers (...) of the day. The book also includes a foreword by Thomas Scanlon. Interviews with Henry Alison, Stanley Cavell, Alan Dershowitz, Cora Diamond, Umberto Eco, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Alexander Nehemas, Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Michael Sandel, Cornel West. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of Walter Benjamin's famous essay, “Unpacking My Library”, this article, by the Librarian of the Warburg Institute, tells the story of the many times that the Warburg Library has been packed and unpacked. First it was the private collection of Aby Warburg, later a public institution, originally in Hamburg and then in London from 1933 to the present. This essay also explores the various ways in which books have been — and continue to be — acquired by (...) the Warburg Library, including publication, donation, recommendation, and purchase. Each of these methods is not only discussed but also examined in light of Benjamin's account of the acquisition of his own library. Moreover, Benjamin's view that collections lose their meaning when they cease to be personal is challenged by the example of the Warburg Library, which has been transformed from a private collection containing around 15,000 books in 1911 to a public institution today housing over 350,000 volumes, while still maintaining its unique character. (shrink)

Phineas Gage’s story is typically offered as a paradigm example supporting the view that part of what matters for personal identity is a certain magnitude of similarity between earlier and later individuals. Yet, reconsidering a slight variant of Phineas Gage’s story indicates that it is not just magnitude of similarity, but also the direction of change that affects personal identity judgments; in some cases, changes for the worse are more seen as identity-severing than changes for the better of (...) comparable magnitude. Ironically, thinking carefully about Phineas Gage’s story tells against the thesis it is typically taken to support. (shrink)

The authors present a neurological theory of how cognitive information and emotional information are integrated in the nucleus accumbens during effective decision making. They describe how the nucleus accumbens acts as a gateway to integrate cognitive information from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus with emotional information from the amygdala. The authors have modeled this integration by a network of spiking artificial neurons organized into separate areas and used this computational model to simulate 2 kinds of cognitive–affective integration. The (...) model simulates successful performance by people with normal cognitive–affective integration. The model also simulates the historical case of Phineas Gage as well as subsequent patients whose ability to make decisions became.. (shrink)

Michael Baxandall was probably the most important art historian of his generation, not just in Britain but in the world. In a series of books published between 1971 and 2003 he kept expanding the frontiers of the discipline, introducing new topics, new ways of writing, and new explanatory models, always demanding of himself and his readers an undissembling clarity of thought and expression. If art history is now a field that can hold its own with more established areas of (...) the humanities, it is largely because Baxandall had a talent to transmit to others through the printed page the powerful intellectual resources he had built up through tireless inward reflection. These resources he applied with equal engagement to Italian Renaissance art criticism, German wood sculpture, the understanding of shadows in the 18th century, the planning of the Forth Bridge, and the functions of the neural structure of the retina. (shrink)

In the last twenty years, a large number of studies have investigated judgments of the identity of various objects (e.g., persons, material objects, institutions) over time. One influential strand of research has found that identity judgments are shaped by normative considerations. People tend to believe that moral improvement is more compatible with the continuity of identity of a person than moral deterioration, suggesting that persons are taken to be essentially morally good. This asymmetry is often referred to as the “ (...) class='Hi'>Phineas Gage effect”. However, normativity extends beyond morality. In particular, it is unknown whether changes in aesthetic value have a similar impact on identity judgments. We investigate whether works of art would be analogously seen as essentially aesthetically valuable. We ran four studies (N=1264) to explore whether aesthetic considerations have a similar influence on judgments of the identity of artworks. We presented the participants with stories describing either a painting or a musical work which undergoes changes and becomes either more or less aesthetically valuable. Overall, we found only mixed evidence for the Phineas Gage effect in relation to the aesthetic value of artworks. Other factors, such as moral value, seem to have a bigger impact on judgments of persistence. (shrink)

The 19th-century story of Phineas Gage is much quoted in neuroscientific literature as the first recorded case in which personality change (from polite and sociable to psychopathic) occurred after damage to the brain. In this article I contest this interpretation. From a close examination of the story of Gage I have come to conclude that first of all there was nothing psychopathic in Gage’s behavior and that changes in his life are more coherently explained by seeing them as his (...) way of dealing with disfigurement that he suffered after the accident. This is not just a matter of reinterpreting a case. The way Gage has been presented and discussed in neuroscientific literature suggests that the new paradigm of neuroscientifically oriented psychiatry may lead to an erosion of clinical knowledge. (shrink)

Phineas Gage is one of the most famous neurological patients. His case is still described in psychology textbooks and in scientific journal articles. A controversy has been going on about the possible consequences of his accident, destroying part of his prefrontal cortex, particularly with respect to behavioral and personality changes. Earlier studies investigated the accuracy of descriptions in psychology textbooks. This is, to my knowledge, the first analysis of journal articles in this respect. These were investigated with regard to (...) four criteria: Description of personality changes, psychopathy-like behavior, alternative explanations besides the immediate brain damage, and Gage’s recovery. 92% of articles described personality changes, 52% of a psychopathy-like kind; only 4% mentioned alternative explanations and 16% described Gage’s recovery. The results are discussed in the light of the available historical evidence. The article closes with several suggestions on improving science communication about the famous case. (shrink)