El objetivo de este trabajo es criticar un artículo de Michael B. McNulty publicado en 2015, a saber, “Rehabilitating the Regulative Use of Reason: Kant on Empirical and Chemical Laws”. En este ...artículo, McNulty examina la concepción kantiana de la necesidad de las leyes empíricas pertenecientes a lo que, en los Primeros principios metafísicos de la ciencia de la naturaleza, se denomina ciencia en un sentido “impropio”. McNulty considera la única ciencia en sentido impropio mencionada por Kant, a saber, la química. En su artículo, McNulty presenta una interpretación original e interesante de esa concepción. Según esta interpretación, ciertas ideas de la razón, que el autor llama “elementos”, son el fundamento de la necesidad de las leyes químicas. Haremos tres críticas a esta interpretación. 1) La tesis de McNulty según la cual desde la perspectiva de la razón las leyes químicas son estrictamente necesarias es cognitivamente irrelevante para nosotros. 2) McNulty no menciona textos de Kant que muestren claramente que su interpretación del fundamento de la necesidad de las leyes químicas es correcta. 3) Nuestra interpretación de la necesidad regulativa de las leyes químicas es más cercana a la concepción kantiana de esas leyes que la lectura de McNulty.
We empirically examine the relationship between business regulation and total (i.e., formal and informal) entrepreneurship using a unique panel data set. We estimate separate regressions for ...opportunity-driven and necessity-driven nascent entrepreneurship as well as young business entrepreneurship based on two different estimation methods (pooled OLS and system GMM). Our results show that business regulation generally rather hinders entrepreneurship. If we additionally consider the development stage of countries, we find different results for high-income and lower-income countries: first, we surprisingly find that stricter employment protection legislation positively affects entrepreneurship in lower-income countries where the informal sector is larger. This might be because more rigid employment laws make waged employment less attractive to employers, who thus push employees into dependent or informal self-employment. Second, we find that stricter insolvency regulation hinders entrepreneurship only in high-income economies. In lower-income economies, where there are more unregistered businesses, insolvency laws might be more difficult to enforce, so entrepreneurship rates are less affected. Third, we find that government intervention in the form of high-quality governmental support programs stimulates opportunity nascent and young business entrepreneurship. This relationship is apparent only in high-income countries, where the formal sector is larger, as such programs typically address formal rather than informal entrepreneurs. Governmental support programs may thus reach the goal of facilitating entrepreneurship only in high-income economies.
Plain English Summary
How does regulation affect entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurial activity is seen as a major driver of economic growth, as it turns knowledge into economic output. This justifies the interest of policy makers around the world in promoting entrepreneurship. While the United States, well-known for their entrepreneurial spirit, have achieved global dominance in the innovation-driven information and communication technology industry, Western European nations failed to catch up in terms of new business creation. This may be due to the different approaches in terms of new business regulations. Nevertheless, our study suggests that a combination of both the low regulation route pursued by the United States and the high support route favored in Continental Europe may best promote the creation of new firms. However, the impact of regulatory measures depends on the development stage of countries and thus on the size of the formal and informal sector. The simultaneous deregulation of firm entry and provision of government support programs might be most fruitful to facilitate entrepreneurial activity, particularly in highly developed economies. However, policy makers in developing economies should consider that some measures, such as improving the labor market regulation, may push people into informal entrepreneurship, which might not be desirable from the policy maker’s perspective.
It is widely known that the most effective way to implement a fuzzy database is to use a classical Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) as the basis. All these systems provide several kinds ...of indexing methods to improve the execution time of classical queries, but they are useless when directly applied to fuzzy queries. For this reason, in this work we propose and evaluate several fuzzy indexing techniques implemented over the indexing techniques available on classical RDBMS in order to enhance flexible queries when based on the necessity measure. As the results show, the best evaluated fuzzy indexing techniques can be implemented on top of classical RDBMS.
The kin selection theory has recently been criticised on the basis of claiming that genetic relatedness does not play a causal role in the social evolution among individuals of insect societies. We ...outline here a line of criticism of this view by demonstrating two things. First, there are strong conceptual, theoretical and empirical reasons to think that close genetic relatedness has been necessary for the rise of the helper castes of social insects. And second, once we understand how causal explanation itself results from an interplay of two logically distinct elements, necessity and sufficiency, we can also understand the scenarios in which relatedness does not seem to play a causal role for evolution of helper castes. The result of this analysis is that we should be more careful about the way we frame the empirical data on the evolution of social behaviour.
The US Army war crimes trials conducted at Manila from 1945-1947 convicted hundreds of Japanese military personnel for war crimes committed during the Philippines campaign. The trials shone light on ...complex legal issues in the formative stages of international law at a critical juncture in modern history. This paper examines three areas of law that were repeatedly tested throughout the trials, namely, questions regarding command responsibility (both de jure and de facto command), and the defences of superior orders and military necessity. The paper outlines sentencing patterns and judicial pronouncements of the law as it was understood and applied in relation to these areas and offers a critique of the trials through the 'just war' theoretical lens.
Abstract I consider whether a contradiction may be deducible from the proposition that God does not exist. First, I expose a candidate counterexample to a key premise in Swinburne’s argument against ...the deducibility of a contradiction from God’s non-existence. Second, I present two new strategies one might use to deduce a contradiction. Both strategies make use of Tarski's T-schema together with developments in other theistic arguments. One argument is a conceptualist argument from necessary truth for a necessary mind, and the other is a two-stage contingency argument for the same conclusion. The purpose of this article is not to decisively defend these arguments, but to expose new territory relevant to investigating the nature of God's necessity (if God exists).
The US Army war crimes trials conducted at Manila from 1945-1947 convicted hundreds of Japanese military personnel for war crimes committed during the Philippines campaign. The trials shone light on ...complex legal issues in the formative stages of international law at a critical juncture in modern history. This paper examines three areas of law that were repeatedly tested throughout the trials, namely, questions regarding command responsibility (both de jure and de facto command), and the defences of superior orders and military necessity. The paper outlines sentencing patterns and judicial pronouncements of the law as it was understood and applied in relation to these areas and offers a critique of the trials through the 'just war' theoretical lens.
The relation of causal necessity with free will has been a source of great debate in the history of philosophy and theology. However, in recent years, it has also been discussed in the science of ...Usul al-Fiqh. After explaining the compatibility of causal necessity with free will, Ākhūnd Khurāsānī speaks of the 'shattering of his pen.' Two interpretations have been given for this statement. Muḥaqqiq Iṣfahānī considers the theory of compatibility that Khurāsānī presented as being correct. However, he interprets the 'shattering of the pen' to be a reference to another matter, i.e., the problem of the recompense of an agent in the case where causal necessity is accepted. His explanation of the aforementioned compatibility and the permissibility of the recompense of sinners has been evaluated in this article. On the contrary, Muḥaqqiq Na'ini considers the 'shattering of the pen' to be a reference to the problem of the conflict between causal necessity and free will. He says that aside from the popular preliminaries of free will, such as knowledge and intention (which are the products of causal necessity), there is a need for something that he calls 'talab'-a noetic action that stems from the governance of the soul. He considers this talab to fall outside the scope of causal necessity. This paper seeks to examine the views of these two illustrious students of Ākhūnd Khurāsānī so that the various Usuli dimensions of this discussion can be clarified.
The Human Paradox shows how the nature of the human is
structured by the conflicting human values and virtues that have
shaped Western culture, and are visible across the world today.
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