George Boole’s Laws of Thought and Indian Logic

This note explores an important problem of the history of science, namely the influence of Indian logic on George Boole’s The Laws of Thought. The theories that have been proposed to explain the origins of Boole’s algebra have ignored his wife Mary’s claim that he was deeply influenced by Indian logic. This note examines this claim and argues that Boole’s focus was more than a framework for propositions and that he was trying to mathematize cognitions as is assumed in Indian logic and to achieve this, he believed an algebraic approach was the most reasonable. By exploring parallels between his work and Indian logic, we can explain several peculiarities of his algebraic system.