In a recent article Robert Paul Wolff has argued that Marx's theory of capitalist exploitation is incorrect, in that its ground is the premiss that labor is the source of all value.1 This, of course, is a well-rehearsed objection to Marx, but Wolff gives it a novel twist. He notes that the defense of this premise in the opening pages of Capital is inadequate, but he is not troubled by this ‘bad argument,’ for he sees Marx's real argument as something else: the (implicit) claim that unless labor is the source of all value, an adequate account of profit is impossible. In other words Marx is seen to be making a transcendental argument: an inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of profit. Wolff proceeds to argue that Marx goes astray here, but not so far astray that a valid transcendental argument, faithful to Marx's essential insight, cannot be charted.

The title is an allusion to the fact that, traditionally, propositions have served at least two distinct functions in philosophy, even though these functions have not usually been distinguished. Propositions have been invoked as the ‘meanings’ or ‘intensions’ of sentences and as the objects of propositional attitudes. Thus the proposition that Socrates is wise is the meaning of the English sentence, ‘Socrates is wise,’ and is what Charles believes when he believes that Socrates is wise. ‘Means that’ and ‘believes that’ take the same kind of object. I shall argue, first, that there are two quite different functions here and it takes two quite different kinds of proposition to serve these distinct functions. The second thing I want to do is examine the suggestion that we can treat propositions as sets of possible worlds. There is a serious difficulty here, and so I shall want to turn that idea on its side: I shall define possible worlds as sets of G-propositions (semantical propositions) and then define E-propositions (epistemic propositions) as sets of possible worlds.

It is a remarkable fact that in the past ten years the Philosophical Index shows a mere handful of entries under the heading ‘poverty.’ This is remarkable because of the widespread interest found in the population in general and among philosophers in particular in the identification, analysis, and solution of moral and social problems, and the cultural consensus that poverty is just such a problem. Perhaps the lack of philosophical attention reflects the assumption that there is no conceptual problem with ‘poverty': we all know pretty much what it is, we simply disagree about the principles which can legitmately be implemented to eliminate it. There is some evidence for this in the fact that literature on distributive justice abounds even where the literature on poverty is scarce, and discussions of related issues, such as famine, population ethics, etc., take for granted that the concept of poverty is not problematic.

When Keats identified truth and beauty, he surely intended mere extensionality. I myself have never had much trouble with either half of the equivalence. Others have considerable difficulty. A case in point is the Watson-Allaire-Cummins interpretation of Berkeley's idealism, which I shall refer to henceforth as the inherence account (IA). That account is put forward to answer an extremely perplexing question in the history of philosophy: Why did Berkeley embrace idealism, i.e., why did he hold that esse est percipi, that to be is to be perceived, indeed that what is perceived must be perceived in order to exist? In essence, the IA answers these questions very simply and elegantly: perceived qualities are, for Berkeley, qualities of the mind in the same sense that, in the tradition of substance metaphysics, blue is a quality of a blue flower; just as the blue of the flower is inseparable from it, so the perceived blue is inseparable from the mind that perceives it.

Let Hn stand for an assembly of n grains of salt. Then the paradox of Sorites may be presented this way:

1. H10,000 is a heap. p

2. If H10,000 is a heap then H10,000-1 is a heap. p

3. H9,999 is a heap. MP

4. H9,999 is a heap then H9,999-1 is a heap. P

   19998. If H2 is a heap then H2-1 is a heap. P

   19999. H1 is a heap. MP

   20000. H1 is not a heap. P

   20001. H1 is and is not a heap. Con

A more significant example of the argument results where Ht stands for a human being (h.b.) at time t (in seconds) where t=O is the present and the human being is one year old.

With very few exceptions philosophers believe that no account of the doctrine of divine omnipotence is adequate if it entails that God can do what is logically impossible. Descartes is credited with believing otherwise. In his article ‘Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths’ (The Philosophical Review, 86, 1977) Harry Frankfurt attributes to Descartes the belief that God is ‘a being for whom the logically impossible is possible’ (44). In addition, Frankfurt claims that because of this belief Descartes’ account of God's omnipotence is open to the charge of being incoherent. I will argue that it is wrong to attribute this belief to Descartes and that if his account of divine omnipotence is incoherent, it is incoherent for reasons other than that it entails the possibility of what is logically impossible.