Happy Birthday, George Boole

George Boole, one of those many brilliant logicians between Aristotle and Frege that philosophers forget to appreciate properly, was born today in 1815. You can read a number of Boole's works online at the Internet Archive. Over the past two years I've come to have a considerable amount of respect for the great British logicians of the Boolean era -- De Morgan, Venn, Carroll, Keynes, and, of course, Boole himself. They should be read more closely and carefully than they usually are.