The question in the title is examined from the standpoint of economic thinking. Three ideas are sustained: (1) if made an objective of economic policy, the necessity of work could be minimized in the distant future; (2) this is not what is desirable or will tend to happen. Even in extreme scenarios of robot adoption considerable demand for human labor should persist in tasks related to the expansion of the knowledge frontier and in those where the humanity of the executor is of the essence for the definition of the task (performing, sports, care, companionship, and so on); (3) redistributive taxation may well be in order. Guaranteed income schemes, and the link with entitlement through work, are discussed.

The daring vision of using big data technology to substantially advance the scientific understanding of human nature, individually and socially, and possibly solve age-old challenges of bridging the subjective and objective sides of human nature, rests on substantial assumptions about the concept of a human being. The daring big data vision may at the same time, in itself, serve to change the very concept of a human, regardless of how well the vision’s assumptions and prospects hold up to scrutiny. This issue of the European Review presents an attempt to critically engage with the question of how this complex situation affects the content and prospects of the vision of reconsidering humanity with the help of big data. In this introduction, the landscape of the issue is sketched and some general remarks of where the emerging map might take future research are made. In general, even if the assumptions of the daring big data vision turn out wanting, pragmatic factors may very well transform our own image of ourselves to fit it.

In a previous paper in the European Review one of us discussed the positioning of the Archangel Gabriel in Annunciation pictures from the point of view of his chirality.1 By means of a very extensive database it was shown that the Angel is mostly represented as dextral, which favours his position on the left of the picture. We have now extended and improved this database. In the previous work we were able to discuss chirality in only a fraction of the over 1000 examples treated, because in many of them the Angel has his arms crossed on his chest. We observed that dextrals normally do this with the right arm over the left one. In 1073 examples from the third century (henceforth C3) to 1750 we found only 99 sinistrals. The period from C3to 1400 is very important, being more stable, so that the pictorial traditions of the Annunciation were established during it and it shows only two sinistrals over 100 examples. There are several hypotheses about the positioning of the Angel and Virgin in the pictures which were not discussed in the previous paper and which will now be treated in the light of our results. It is clear that there are two different strands: until 1400 the weight of tradition prevails, but after this period fashion becomes more significant, with great painters such as Titian creating a large number of imitators. After 1400, composition becomes freer and more complex and artists become more interested in the pictorial impact of their work than the iconographic impact. The new freedom enjoyed by the artists means nevertheless that some purely pictorial conventions acquire greater weight; they appear to rule the composition and are discussed in detail in this article.

Despite the large amount of work on Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, there are some problems that require attention, the most important being the alleged effect of the Council of Trent on this picture, which was withdrawn from the cult from 1583 to 1697: the usual interpretation that it had become unorthodox appears to be without foundation. There are also some questions about its iconology, which raise interesting conjectures about syncretic inputs.

As governments grapple with increased risks associated with more frequent and impactful disasters, climate change, social inequity, urbanization, and aging infrastructure, questions about resilience take on greater urgency. The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine strive for science to be beneficial to society. In 2012, the National Academies released a report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative, that provided recommendations around critical issues of resilience and strategic steps the United States could take towards building disaster resilience. A new program, the Resilient America Program, was created as an outgrowth of that report. Its core mission is to partner with communities across the nation to help decision-makers identify key priorities for their community; tie those priorities to relevant risks; and identify actions that build resilience to those risks. The Resilient America Program is a novel program of the National Academies; it employs a hands-on approach to bring science into decision-making by working directly with decision-makers to test approaches for communicating and managing risk, measuring resilience, building community partnerships, and sharing relevant resilience information.

Big Data has the potential to enable unprecedentedly rigorous quantitative modeling of complex human social relationships and social structures. When such models are extended to non-human domains, they can undermine anthropocentric assumptions about the extent to which these relationships and structures are specifically human. Discoveries of relevant commonalities with non-humans may not make us less human, but they promise to challenge fundamental views of what it is to be human.

The article starts with the analysis of the origin and development of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) until the 2013 Gezi Uprisings. It tries to show that the AKP first tried to survive in a defensive manner in the so-called ‘Kemalist secular republic’, and thus established strategic relations with non- or anti-Kemalist sections of society. It then chose an offensive strategy to maintain its power against attacks from traditional political and ideological forces in Turkey, such as the army, mainstream political parties and the official ideology of the Republic. However, it is argued that the more power it accumulates the more it loses or leaves its allies and the more it is alienated. As a result, it becomes more authoritarian. The article will be followed by a second part to be published in the next issue of this journal, which deals with the reactions to AKP’s authoritarian and offensive politics and ideology, and the new measures AKP has taken for its survival.

Why did English lords build Gothic ruins, Flemish textile barons recreate medieval cities, and the Prussian elites restore castles?

Why does it feel that the time passes faster as we get older? What is the physical basis for the impression that some days are slower than others? Why do we tend to focus on the unusual (the surprise), not on the ever present? This article unveils the physics basis for these common observations. The reason is that the measurable ‘clock time’ is not the same as the time perceived by the human mind. The ‘mind time’ is a sequence of images, i.e. reflections of nature that are fed by stimuli from sensory organs. The rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases with age, because of several physical features that change with age: saccades frequency, body size, pathways degradation, etc. The misalignment between mental-image time and clock time serves to unite the voluminous observations of this phenomenon in the literature with the constructal law of evolution of flow architecture, as physics.

Since the introduction of new technologies, the deluge of neuroscientific data has been overwhelming. On one hand this new information has produced remarkable breakthroughs in our understanding of brain function and development as well as lifesaving treatments for trauma and disease. On the other hand, the lure and reward for explanations of mental phenomena in terms of simple, manipulable brain processes has led to questionable research methodologies and unsubstantiated claims. A more fundamental issue is raised by the attempt to explain consciousness by means of information, as proposed by the Information Integration Theory (IIT). While the models produced by this massive computation of data will no doubt improve our understanding of brain function and capacity, a strict information processing approach cannot address the problem of meaning. A solution to this problem demands an evolutionary, developmental, and dynamic account of an organism in its environment. Data analysis will play a role in this inclusive explanatory program, but explanation is insufficient by data alone.

In 2013, in light of the mass atrocity cases in Libya and Syria, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament recommended ‘to reconfirm the EU’s commitment to R2P [Responsibility to Protect] by adopting an interinstitutional “Consensus on R2P”’. Despite such reaffirmation, the Union’s role in implementing R2P remains an open-ended question. To date, the EU’s contribution to R2P has rarely been studied. In our attempt to contribute to the literature, approaching the issue from an ethical perspective, we aim to answer the following questions: what are the existing capacities of the EU in contributing to R2P; and what can the EU do to be a more responsible actor in the future? After identifying the existing capacities of the Union, we analyse what the EU can do to make the international community more responsible in the future given that we have already left behind the first decade of the norm, which was characterized by inconsistent implementation. Finally, we conclude that the Union holds a genuine potential for further development and a consistent implementation of the norm mainly by utilizing its non-military tools.

A discussion of the sustainability and resilience of European research could not come at a more opportune and important time, as the EU begins to shape its new research programme Horizon Europe, and the UK considers the future following its vote to leave the European Union. Faced with such disruption, we must establish goals and make plans to develop a stronger European research endeavour. Since the UK’s vote to leave the European Union in June 2016, representatives of the UK’s national academy of science, the Royal Society, have travelled extensively to underline the global nature of science. We have found supportive partners, willing to work together towards a good outcome for European research. In addition, we have been involved in close discussions with the UK Government.

The Swiss Academies have the experience of three decades of facilitating a dialogue between science and society. This includes the provision of scientific knowledge to policy decision-makers. Climate change is a topic that has been important in this context from the beginning. A recent example of science policy work in this domain has been the analysis of the findings of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),1 and the formulation of recommendations for policy-making at a national level in order to tackle the challenges posed by climate change on the population and the environment of Switzerland. Taking this specific example, the current paper showcases how academies can provide scientific knowledge at the science–policy interface to help tackle real-world challenges. With reference to this case study, and based on their longer-term science-policy engagement, this contribution concludes by describing the elements considered as essential for a successful dialogue between the actors in science and policy-making.

In this article, I claim that Wittgenstein was familiar with Hamann’s work, particularly with two of the latter’s original contributions: (a) the idea of transforming Luther’s concept of grammar into a critical philosophical and linguistic tool; and (b) Hamann’s use of a kenotic, impure style as a means to attain the humility his religious stance demands. I suggest that an understanding of Hamann’s style as a tool to achieve humility sheds light on Wittgenstein’s later refutation of the purity of the Tractarian style. As reflected in remarks published in collections such as Culture and Value and Public and Private Occasions, Wittgenstein – like Hamann – aspired to modesty not only in his private life, but also in his philosophical work, attributing it a religious significance. In this context, his later style of philosophizing, characterized by the use of everyday rather than metaphysical terms, the inclusion of impure concepts and humble examples, dialogue and fragmentariness, is a means to ‘dismantle one’s pride’, in the practice of philosophy conceived as ‘working on oneself’.

This study investigates the impact of financial depth and capital market development on the growth of European nations. Financial depth is important if the benefits of financial integration are to be realized. In fact, financial depth is a channel that promotes growth and risk sharing and curbs macroeconomic volatility. Panel data of 17 European nations from 1970 to 2013 were taken and results were obtained through the Pool Mean Group Estimation technique. Our results show that, for European nations, financial depth and stock market development contributed to long-term growth. However, the contribution of financial depth outweighs that of stock market development. Moreover, it was observed that in the case of Hungary and Ireland, capital market development and financial depth contributed to short-term growth. Trade openness was found to be significant for growth in the cases of Austria and Finland while financial depth and trade openness were found to be significant for Germany and Switzerland. In conclusion, in the short-run, financial depth contributed more to growth than stock market development. Therefore, the role of financial depth in enhancing growth can be said to be more persistent than that of stock market development.

The growth of continuously generated, large-scale datasets, and new analytics to handle them, has created expectations, in some quarters, that new insights can be generated that will help us address the biggest challenges that face us as a species and therefore can shape future societal outcomes. It is hoped that these new technologies will lead not just to new discoveries but also to new questions and thinking that will deliver significant scientific advances. Perhaps there will be some genuine scientific advances but since many of the challenges that face us reside in the human world and depend upon how humans behave, we need to turn to the humanities and the social sciences as well as the natural sciences and look at the role Big Data could play there in adding to, or shaping, our future. And here, what concerns us is not just the assumptions guiding the new analytic techniques for data mining, data merging, linking and analysis, born out of smarter AI algorithms, it is a more fundamental issue about the constraints and limitations of the kind of data inputs and outputs being appealed to in Big Data systems and whether they are well served to provide an understanding of the human world.

This paper examines the relationship between debt-oriented capital structure and economic growth by analysing a panel data of 16 European countries, based on the availability of data. We find that the corporate leverage in financial and non-financial corporations affects economic growth negatively. Furthermore, the results indicate that the leverage in non-financial corporations affects economic growth more than the leverage in financial corporations. This is due to the direct relationship between economic growth and the real sector and the fact that non-financial corporations in OECD countries hold more debt as compared with financial corporations.

Science and art have long recognized that perceptual experience depends on the involvement of the experiencer. In art history, this idea is captured by Ernst Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’. In neuroscience, it traces to Helmholtz’s concept of ‘perception as inference’, which is enjoying renewed prominence in the guise of ‘prediction error minimization’ (PEM) or the ‘Bayesian brain’. The shared idea is that our perceptual experience – whether of the world, of ourselves, or of an artwork – depends on the active ‘top-down’ interpretation of sensory input. Perception becomes a generative act, in which perceptual, cognitive, affective, and sociocultural expectations conspire to shape the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of sensory signals. In this article, I explore the parallels between the Bayesian brain and the beholders’ share, illustrated, somewhat informally, with examples from Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist art. By connecting phenomenological insights from these traditions with the cognitive neuroscience of predictive perception, I outline a reciprocal relationship in which art reveals phenomenological targets for neurocognitive accounts of subjectivity, while the concepts of predictive perception may in turn help make mechanistic sense of the beholder’s share. This is not standard neuroaesthetics – the attempt to discover the brain basis of aesthetic experience – nor is it any kind of neuro-fangled ‘theory of art’. It is instead an examination of one way in which art and brain science can be equal partners in revealing deep truths about human experience.

In recent years investor–state arbitration has faced a number of criticisms, such as the pro-investor allegation, the lack of transparency and the regulatory chilling effect. In 2015, the EU proposed an Investment Court System (ICS) in the investment chapter of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiated between the EU and the US. This new mechanism is designed to improve the investor–state dispute settlement mechanisms, in particular the investor–state arbitration. A unique feature of the ICS is that it deprives the right of the disputing parties to appoint arbitrators. This is an apparent departure from the common practice of conventional investor–state arbitration, such as that conducted under the rules of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. This new approach seems to formulate itself on the pro-investor hypothesis that asserts that the appointment of an arbitrator by an investor will lead to the appointee’s bias in favour of the investor. This paper assesses whether such methodology is justifiable and necessary by discussing the pro-investor allegation and rebutting it with empirical evidence. This paper considers the challenge procedure as the more appropriate and practical safeguard against an arbitrator’s bias.