2026.04.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Edwin Mares, The Logic of Entailment and its History, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 280pp., $32.99 (pbk) ISBN 9781009375276.
Reviewed by Rohan French, University of California, Davis
Anderson & Belnap, in their monumental work, Entailment: the Logic of Relevance and Necessity, placed the entailment connective—a connective expressing the concept first introduced by G.E. Moore in ‘External and Internal Relations’ as the converse of deducibility—at the heart of logic. They argued that the entailment connective should be both relevant, avoiding the paradoxes of implication, as well as modal, avoiding the so-called paradoxes of modality. Their argument for the relevant logic E being the correct logic of entailment turned on it being the logic that arose from imposing a S4-style restriction on the Fitch-style natural deduction system for the relevant logic R, viewed there as the correct logic of contingent relevant implication. In fact, Meyer showed that, at least in the implicational fragment, E…
