Abstract

In the light of Jules Vuillemin’s intuitionistic interpretation of Epicurus’ system, this article studies evidence relating to Chrysippus’ treatment of the law of the excluded middle. Several passages from Cicero, Plutarch and Sextus Empiricus indeed seem to suggest that Chrysippus adopted a decidedly non-classical attitude towards this principle in some dialectical, mathematical and physical contexts. From a logical point of view, it would appear that Chrysippus’ system neither denies nor suspends the application of this principle but rather dispenses with it. The presence of these genuinely intuitionistic schemes in the logical part of a system emblematic of the “nominalism of events” is thus interpreted as characteristic of Hellenistic epistemology, marked by the predominance of “systems of examination” following the earlier domination of “dogmatic” philosophies of form.