De Re Modality in the Late 20th Century: The Prescient Quine

Quine’s (in)famous skeptical critique of de re modality is expounded in the pair of 1953 classic papers ‘Reference and Modality’ and ‘Three Grades of Modal Involvement’. Here, I position the salient, and non-skeptical, treatments of de re modality in the later part of the twentieth century—those due to Kripke, Lewis and Fine—in relation to that prior skeptical critique. I emphasize the insights on which Quine’s skepticism was based and commend these as sound and enduring.