Chrysippus

Chrysippus of Soli was born around 279 BCE in Soli, a Greek city on the southern coast of Cilicia (modern Mersin, Turkey). He came to Athens as a young man and studied first under Arcesilaus and Lacydes at the sceptical Academy — training that would shape his lifelong engagement with the theory of argument — before attaching himself to Cleanthes at the Stoa.

On Cleanthes's death around 230 BCE he became the third head (scholarch) of the Stoic school, a position he held for roughly a quarter-century. He was by ancient report prodigiously productive: Diogenes Laertius credits him with more than 705 books and preserves a partial catalogue running to hundreds of titles. None of these works survives intact.

He died around 206 BCE — by one tradition after laughing too hard at the sight of a donkey eating figs, a story almost certainly apocryphal but widely quoted in antiquity.

No work of Chrysippus survives complete. What we have are fragments and testimonia quoted by later authors — Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, Cicero, Galen, Stobaeus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and the Suda. Known titles include On Fate, Logical Investigations, On the Soul, On Providence, On Nature, and On Ends. The standard modern collection is Hans von Arnim's Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (1903–24), in which Chrysippus occupies volumes II and III.

c. 279 BCE — born in Soli, Cilicia.
c. 260 BCE — arrives in Athens; studies under Arcesilaus and Lacydes at the Academy.
c. 255 BCE — transfers to the Stoa under Cleanthes.
c. 230 BCE — succeeds Cleanthes as third head of the Stoa.
c. 230–206 BCE — writes the works that systematize Stoic doctrine.
c. 206 BCE — dies in Athens.

Chrysippus was the chief architect of Stoic doctrine as it came down to later antiquity. An ancient maxim ran: "If there had been no Chrysippus, there would have been no Stoa." He systematized Stoic logic, physics, and ethics into the form later Stoics inherited, and resolved or attempted to resolve the paradoxes — the Liar, the Sorites — that had been used against earlier Stoic positions.

His work in logic was largely forgotten for two millennia until modern logicians beginning with Peirce and Lukasiewicz recognized in his surviving fragments an anticipation of propositional logic that would not be fully recovered until Frege and Russell.