G. A. Cohen, in his ‘The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,’ addresses the classical Marxist claim that workers are forced to sell their labour power under capitalism. This claim has been the object of much debate and controversy. Cohen brings his very considerable analytical skills to bear on this question with the result that he supports, in distinctive but non-conflicting ways, both sides of the controversy. On Cohen’s analysis this claim is ambiguous, i.e., the term ‘proletariat’ has two importantly different senses. In the distributive sense, workers need not be coerced, but in the collective sense, they are coerced, i.e., each individual worker is free to leave the working class, but the class of workers' as a whole does not possess a similar freedom. In this paper, I will argue that Cohen’s argument does not establish that the proletariat qua individuals are not forced to sell their labour power. It will also be argued that, in fac;t, there is no definite answer to the question of whether or not workers are forced to sell their labour power. Freedom and coercion are matters of degree, for the relevant range of cases, and, hence, it is not appropriate to ask whether or not the workers are coerced. I will, however, attempt to show that, contrary to the spirit of Cohen’s thesis, proletariat as individuals suffer from a diminished degree of freedom in the sale of their labour power.

I take two passages in a recent paper by Kent Bach—‘Newcomb's Problem: The $1,000,000 Solution,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1987) 409-25—as occasions for several observations about practical arguments and senses in which they may ‘work’ and be ‘good.’

The Problem of the value of truth came before us – or was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.

– Nietzsche

Arthur Fine, in his defense of the Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA), has argued that any attempt to analyze truth will fail because any such analysis presupposes an untenable essentialism. In particular, he asserts that the anti-realist analysis of truth commits itself to there being an essential property which all true statements possess, qua true statements. It is this commitment which he castigates.

In defending NOA against some contemporary antirealisms I distinguish two antirealist camps: the epistemology inflaters, who come to their antirealism by filling up inquiry and belief formation with various warrants and principles of justification, and the semantic inflaters, or truthmongers, who come to their antirealism by exchanging truth for some epistemic notion, like ideal rational acceptablility. In parity with arguments against the correspondence theory of truth, which I see at the heart of various realisms, I argue against antirealist truthmongering in two ways. One is inductive and hortative. I point to the history of failures of all past attempts at theories of truth, and try to suggest better things for philosophy to do instead. The other way is deconstructive. I examine the attempted explications of truth in the terms set by their own discourses, and try to show that they cannot actually stand on their own there. Lily Knezevich looks at this deconstructive work in her ‘Truthmongering‘ and finds it flawed by what I will call ‘Knezevich’s fallacy.’ (Generously, she refers to it as my fallacy. But surely the rule in these things is to let the name, and therefore the honor, attach to the discoverer, not the alleged perpetrator.)

There are no intimate connections between Locke's political thought and his general philosophical position — that, at least, is the longestablished view, the accepted orthodoxy. Locke's Second Treatise of Government, so it is held, presents doctrines which are unrelated to, or perhaps even in conflict with, those of the Essay concerning Human Understanding.For contemporary students and scholars this view is firmly established through Peter Laslett's influential ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government.At the moment it receives powerful support from a magisterial work by an author well known both as political theorist and as commentator on Locke: Richard Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics & Locke's Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986). Ashcraft's reductive contextualism and his concomitant intentional neglect of certain philosophical (particularly methodological and epistemological) dimensions of Locke's position would lead us to read the 2T more as a piece of parochial political propaganda than as a treatise of political theory.