We estimate the effect on business start-ups of a program that significantly speeds up firm registration procedures. The program was implemented in Mexico in different municipalities at different dates. Our estimates suggest that new start-ups increased by about 4% in eligible industries, and we present evidence that this is a causal effect. Most of the effect is temporary, concentrated in the first 10 months after implementation. The effect is robust to several specifications of the benchmark control group time trends. We (...) find that the program was more effective in municipalities with less corruption and cheaper additional procedures. (shrink)

El artículo busca dilucidar algunas características del epistolario en tanto que fuente historiográfica y encontrar claves de comparación con la autobiografía. Con importantes aspectos en común, sus propósitos, sus sesgos y la posición subjetiva de sus autores evidencian importantes diferencias. A partir de esta problemática, se analizará la correspondencia sostenida por Max Weber desde el servicio militar durante la Gran Guerra. En un período en el que no tiene intervención pública alguna, el análisis se centra en la evolución de su (...) perspectiva sobre el papel de Alemania y sobre su actividad específica en los lazaretos. Cada uno de estos aspectos se relaciona respectivamente con dos piedras angulares de la obra weberiana: el problema nacional y el proceso de burocratización. (shrink)

El presente trabajo propone un enfoque comparativo entre en la noción de restos, tal como es conceptualizada por Eduardo Rinesi desde el pensamiento trágico, y los distintos abordajes de la misma presentes en la obra de Slavoj Žižek. En virtud de este recorrido, se indaga cómo ambos autores problematizan el vínculo entre los restos y la pregunta por el fundamento último de lo social, en cuanto piedra angular de las ontologías modernas, para finalmente analizar cómo a partir de (...) estas diferentes aproximaciones es posible pensar lo político como la dimensión de subversión e institución de todo orden. (shrink)

It is often believed that the only alternative to an idealist conception of natural phenomena excludes both the presence of objective universal forms and their progression towards higher forms as the finality of processes in the natural world. Realism regarding the universal and teleological approaches regarding processes are signs of idealism. Therefore, materialism, it would seem, must conform to a nominalist and mechanical view of nature. However, an intelligent materialist reading of idealism’s classics reveals a more complex scenario. A real (...) fact is expressed in a mystical fashion in idealism’s conceptions of objective universals and teleology. This article attempts to show such a real fact in its authentic (materialist) form. With that goal in mind, the present article discusses the notion of nature’s alienation, the distinction between abstract and concrete universals, and the concept of dialectical interaction. The natural-historical emergence of a higher form of matter’s organization assimilates, as its organs, the conditions that preceded it in time, transforming itself into an active producer of such conditions. That is the secret glimpsed but not correctly understood by idealism that a consistent materialist should not ignore. (shrink)

Within the current resurgence of interest in E.V. Ilyenkov, the influence of Engels on Ilyenkov’s work is either overlooked or denied, making Ilyenkov seem closer to Western Marxism than he actually is. In this paper, by considering Engels’s place in his philosophy, I show that Ilyenkov’s approach is fundamentally hostile to many of Western Marxism’s main views. Ilyenkov, like Engels, conceives philosophy as Logic and affirms the ‘alliance’ between philosophy and the natural sciences against speculative metaphysics. In this regard, he (...) develops an original cosmological hypothesis based on Engels’s insights on the hierarchy of matter’s forms of movement and provides a remarkable account of the ideal as an attribute of nature that reproduces its concrete universality through social labour, the active transformation of nature’s phenomena into objects stamped with the seal of our subjectivity. (shrink)

In this essay an engineer and a philosopher, after many conversations, develop an argument for why the Aristotelian version of virtue ethics is the most promising way to develop what we call artificial moral, social agents, i.e. robots. This, evidently, applies to humans as well. There are several claims: first, that humans are not born moral, they are socialized into morality; second, that morality involves affect, emotion, feeling, before it engages reason; third, that how a moral being feels is related (...) to some narrative, whether moral or not; and finally, that narrativity is what builds a sense of a “moral” I, namely an authorial moral self. (shrink)

Eshel Ben-Jacob’s manuscript entitled ‘Bacterial wisdom, Gödel’s theorem and creative genomic webs’ summarizes decades of work demonstrating adaptive mutagenesis in bacterial genomes. Bacterial genomes, each an essential part of a Kantian whole that is a single bacterium, are thus not independent of the environment as sensed; and a single bacterium is therefore a semiotic entity. Ben-Jacob suggests this but errs in 1) assigning autonomy to the genome, and 2) analogizing through computation without making clear whether he is doing so for (...) illustrative purposes or making committed ontological propositions. We reinterpret adaptive mutagenesis and related phenomena in ways both metaphysically rigorous and revealing. We conclude that bacteria are much farther removed from the ‘self-organizing’ world of inanimate process than from the Peircian world of signs; and a critical reappraisal of existing knowledge can enhance our understanding of selfhood, semiosis, and the roots of subjective experience. (shrink)

By the beginning of the 19th century Hegel's dialectic turned contradiction (conceived as unity of a concept with its determined negation) into distinguished inference. In the course of 20th century a family of systems known as "paraconsistent" formalized dialectical logic according to the contemporary paradigm of inference, oriented to truth-preserving, and not powered anymore solely by contradiction. In this way, nevertheless, Hegel's idea of logic as unfolding of concepts ordered by degree of "determination" reached at every step of the process, (...) was put aside. We attempt to recover the importance of that idea for the hegelian concept of "logical necessity", pointing out in addition that it may well play the role of an order relation for dialectical inference. (shrink)

SummaryThis article presents the development and current situation of the sociology of sport in Spain. It begins with a brief description of its origins and development as an academic field, which can be divided into three stages: birth, growth, and consolidation and internationalization. It then describes the theoretical and methodological traditions as well as the predominant topics (including the most representative research) in the social scientific studies on physical activity conducted so far in Spain. The main topics have been sports (...) in society, sports controversies, the social sports structure, sports identities and spaces for practicing sports, organization, management, and the job market. The article concludes with an analysis of the possible future challenges for the sociology of sport in Spain and the role that the journal Sociología del Deporte (Sociology of Sport) can play in view of these challenges. (shrink)

I try to show that Steiner’s theory has very implausible normative consequences since it does not accept the prima facie character or rights. This theory is unable to solve the conflicts of interests in which the only intuitively plausible solution consists in overriding someone’s rights.