Concepts and the Epistemology of Essence

This paper is an exploration of the prospects of rationalist, concept-based epistemologies of modality as far as essentialist and de re modal claims are concerned. I grant certain explanatory power to such epistemologies but, primarily, I identify their limitations. I first explore them in view of the (possible) existence of general as well as of singular modally loaded concepts and find their explanatory scope severely limited. Inspired by the abstractionist’s concept-andentitlement based hybrid model, the paper then explores a similarly hybrid strategy. The outcome of this exploration is that, regardless of its explanatory scope, it would be a misnomer to describe such hybrid view as concept-based. The result generalizes.