Despite his faults, George Boole is one of the greatest logicians of all time and he ranks even higher as a philosopher of logic than as a logician. His 1854 Laws of Thought was his only mature book on logic. It has been read by generations of logicians and by students of logic. And each new generation finds new things to admire and new things to criticise. It is interesting that of all the giants of philosophy of logic it is Boole that people feel most free to criticise. Aristotle, Ockham, Frege, Russell, Gödel, Church, Quine and even Tarski made statements that go counter to the most deeply held doctrines of our period, but their ‘mistakes’ either go unmentioned or are glossed over in a respectful way.
Aristotle has no rival to the title of founder of logic, even though his achievement would be unthinkable without the emphasis on deductive reasoning in geometry that he found in Plato’s Academy, or without the deep and critical awareness of the power of proof and the danger of fallacy fostered by Socrates. Boole can be, and often is, regarded as the founder of mathematical logic. For example, Lewis and Langford wrote (1932/1959, p. 89): ‘almost all developments of symbolic logic . . . [have] been built up gradually on the foundation laid by Boole . . .’. The only person besides Boole who is ever mentioned as the founder of mathematical logic is the great German logician Frege, whose works are often forbiddingly difficult. But even Frege’s most ardent supporters do not fail to accord founder status to Boole, although one of them does try to make Boole share honors with others: ‘Boole, De Morgan, and Jevons are regarded as the initiators of modern [mathematical] logic, and rightly so’ (van Heijenoort 1967, p. vi). Copi and Gould (1967, p. 75) agree with many other logicians who say that Frege is regarded as the second founder of modern symbolic logic after Boole.
(John Corcoran, "Aristotle's Prior Analytics and Boole's Laws of Thought," History and Philosophy of Logic 24 [December 2003]: 261-88, at 284 [italics, ellipses, and brackets in original; footnote omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 