NDPR Gillian K. Russell Barriers to Entailment: Hume’s Law and Other Limits to Logical Consequence

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.11.8 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Gillian K. Russell, Barriers to Entailment: Hume’s Law and Other Limits to Logical Consequence, Oxford University Press, 2023, 316pp., $84.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780192874733.

Reviewed by Charles Pigden, University of Otago (Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka)

First things first. Barriers to Entailment (henceforward BtE) is a brilliant book, a major contribution to metaethics and philosophy of logic, with important implications (or so it seems to me) for philosophy of time, the metaphysics of supervenience and the logic of indexicals. I am not going to say that it is compulsory reading (at least for meta-ethicists and logicians), since that suggests that it is a chore to read, which it most definitely is not. The writing is fresh, friendly, funny and unpretentious (though occasionally erring on the side of brevity), and though it is sometimes a bit hard-going...