• Korean Journal of Logic
• /
• v.21 no.2
• /
• pp.175-207
• /
• 2018

Since Kit Fine's influential paper, Essence and Modality (1994), many philosophers have doubted the prospects of modalism, according to which we can analyze the concept of essence with that of de re modality. However, some philosophers have tried to save modalism against Fine's counterexamples seriously. In this paper, we examine two such attempts which appeal to some kind of 'impossible possibilities.' We argue that such attempts have strong tendency to end in either a metaphysical picture which is very similar to Fine's or a concept of essence which is quite different from Fine's. For this reason, we claim that Fine has no reason to worry about such attempts.