Kit Fine has since the 1970s been one of the leading contributors to work at the intersection of logic and metaphysics. This is his eagerly-awaited first book in the area. It draws together a series of essays, three of them previously unpublished, on possibility, necessity, and tense. These puzzling aspects of the way the world is have been the focus of considerable philosophical attention in recent decades.Fine gives here the definitive exposition and defence of certain positions for which he is well known: the intelligibility of modality de re; the primitiveness of the modal; and the primacy