That Obscure Object of Desire

In the fifties, Quine sounded a call to arms against all sorts of creatures of darkness: propositions, meanings, non-existent objects, and the like.' Since then, many of those creatures have found safe haven in other possible worlds or in Meinongian appendages of the actual one, with one notable exception: objects of desire. The anomaly has gone largely unnoticed; in the present paper, I want to focus on it, and make it into an Archimedean turning point for a conceptual revolution of the Kantian variety.