Indian Logic - Influence of Indian Logic On Modern Logic

Influence of Indian Logic On Modern Logic

In the late 18th century, British scholars began to take an interest in Indian philosophy and discovered the sophistication of the Indian study of inference, culminating in Henry T. Colebrooke's The Philosophy of the Hindus: On the Nyaya and Vaisesika Systems in 1824, which provided an analysis of inference and comparison to the received Aristotelian logic, resulting in the observation that the Aristotelian syllogism could not account for the Indian syllogism. Max Mueller contributed an appendix to Thomson's Laws of Thought (1853), in which he placed Greek and Indian logic on the same plane: "The sciences of Logic and Grammar were, as far as history allows us to judge, invented or originally conceived by two nations only, by Hindus and Greeks."

Jonardon Ganeri has observed that this period saw George Boole and Augustus De Morgan make their pioneering applications of algebraic ideas to the formulation of logic (such as Algebraic logic and Boolean logic), and suggested that these figures were likely to be aware of these studies in xeno-logic, and further that their acquired awareness of the shortcomings of propositional logic are likely to have stimulated their willingness to look outside the system.

Indian logic attracted the attention of many Western scholars, and has had an influence on pioneering 19th-century logicians such as Charles Babbage, Augustus De Morgan, and particularly George Boole, as confirmed by his wife Mary Everest Boole in an "open letter to Dr Bose" titled "Indian Thought and Western Science in the Nineteenth Century" written in 1901:

De Morgan himself wrote in 1860 of the significance of Indian logic: "The two races which have founded the mathematics, those of the Sanscrit and Greek languages, have been the two which have independently formed systems of logic."

Mathematicians are now aware of the influence of Indian mathematics on the European. For example, Hermann Weyl wrote: "Occidental mathematics has in past centuries broken away from the Greek view and followed a course which seems to have originated in India and which has been transmitted, with additions, to us by the Arabs; in it the concept of number appears as logically prior to the concepts of geometry." (Weyl, 1929)