One of the many striking theses for which Virginia Held argues in How Terrorism Is Wrong is that terrorism is not necessarily morally wrong. In principle, she argues, terrorism can sometimes be permissible . Call this "the Non-necessity Thesis," or NNT. As so often in this deep and thought-provoking book, Held gives a powerful and illuminating argument to this thesis. The argument begins by asserting what we may call "the Violations Distribution Principle" : if we must have rights violations, then (...) a more equitable distribution of such violations is better than a less equitable . It then claims that this implies that "it is better to equalize rights violations in a transition to bring an end to rights violations than it is to subject a given group that has already suffered extensive rights violations to continued such violations" . But this in turn implies that where one group's rights are severely and systematically violated— say, by an oppression, in which their right to personal safety is systematically violated—and another group's rights are not so violated, then a transition which involves a sharing of proportionate rights violations between the oppressed and the non-oppressed is permissible, "if this and only this can be expected to lead to a situation in which rights are more adequately respected" . In those and only those circumstances, terrorism would be permissible, since it centrally violates the right to personal safety. Hence NNT. The idea, then, is that VDP implies that where there is a systematic imbalance in the distribution of severe rights violations between one group and another , and where only a transition which involves a sharing of proportionate rights violations between the oppressed and the non-oppressed can be expected to achieve a situation in which rights are more adequately respected , then terrorism aimed at the oppressors and in conformity with the Uniqueness condition is permissible. (shrink)

Originally published in 1957, this book collects together large sections of important tracts from a variety of political documents, particularly those concerned with democracy, communism, Protestantism or Catholicism. The extracts come from a wide range of authors including Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx, John Locke and Pope Pius XII. This book will be of value to anyone seeking an overview of the key political divisions in the late 20th century or who is interested in political theory generally.

It has been widely argued that words are analogous to species such that words, like species, are natural kinds. In this paper, I consider the metaphysics of word-kinds. After arguing against an essentialist approach, I argue that word-kinds are homeostatic property clusters, in line with the dominant approach to other biological and psychological kinds.

Johanna Knapstein,1 Daniel Grimm,1 Marcus A Wörns,1 Peter R Galle,1 Hauke Lang,2 Tim Zimmermann111st Department of Internal Medicine, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany; 2Department of General, Visceral and Transplantation Surgery, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, GermanyIntroduction: Hepatitis C virus reinfection occurs universally after liver transplantation, with accelerated cirrhosis rates of up to 30% within 5 years after liver transplantation. Dual antiviral therapy with pegylated interferon-2a and ribavirin only reaches sustained virological response rates of ~30% after liver transplantation. With the approval of viral NS3/4A (...) protease inhibitors telaprevir, boceprevir, and simeprevir and the NS5B polymerase inhibitor sofosbuvir, combination therapy offers new therapeutic options for HCV-infected patients, resulting in considerably higher sustained virological response rates in the nontransplant setting. Case presentation: We report three cases of TVR-based triple antiviral therapy in HCV genotype 1 reinfected patients after liver transplantation, of whom a 57-year-old Caucasian female and a 43-year-old Caucasian male were therapy naïve, and a 49-year-old Caucasian male patient was pretreated ineffectively. After 4 weeks of therapy, viral load decreased one to three log10 and became negative in weeks 6 to 8 in the therapy naïve patients. The pretreated patient showed a negative viral load in week 4. TVR was administered over 12 weeks, 750 mg thrice daily. Doses of immunosuppression with cyclosporine were reduced four to six fold. Initial peg-IFN and RBV doses ranged from 135–180 µg/week and 800–1,200 mg/day, according to the patient's body weight. Doses of peg-IFN and RBV were adapted to 90–135 µg/week and 400–800 mg/day after 2 to 12 weeks of protease inhibitor therapy. Dual therapy was continued for 36 weeks with total treatment duration of 48 weeks in the therapy naïve patients leading to a sustained virological response 12 weeks after the end of therapy. In the pretreated patient a breakthrough was detected in week 24 and therapy was discontinued. Overall, antiviral therapy was well tolerated. Side effects included dysgeusia and anemia leading to erythropoietin application and blood transfusions. Conclusion: This case series emphasizes that triple therapy with TVR is an efficient treatment for therapy naïve HCV genotype 1 reinfected patients after liver transplantation. But therapeutic options for pretreated patients require improvement. Keyword: cyclosporine, interferon, ribavirin, hepatitis C, protease inhibitor. (shrink)

The natural name theory, recently discussed by Johnson (2018), is proposed as an explanation of pure quotation where the quoted term(s) refers to a linguistic object such as in the sentence ‘In the above, ‘bank’ is ambiguous’. After outlining the theory, I raise a problem for the natural name theory. I argue that positing a resemblance relation between the name and the linguistic object it names does not allow us to rule out cases where the natural name fails to resemble (...) the linguistic object it names. I argue that to avoid this problem, we can combine the natural name theory with a type-realist metaphysics of language, and hold that the name is natural because the name is an instance of the kind that it names. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of the metaphysics of language for questions in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance of centralized information-processing and control in the service of system-wide goals is mere appearance, i.e., an explanatory (...) heuristic we have evolved to predict behavior, but one that will eventually get swept away in the advancing tide of self-organization. I argue that there is a distinction of central importance here, and that no adequate science of complex systems can dispense with it. (shrink)