Comment le scepticisme est devenu un système. La classification de Jules Vuillemin et ses transformations

Abstract

In an unpublished text dated 1979, Jules Vuillemin sent the Finnish philosopher and logician Georg Henrik von Wright a list of solutions to the Master Argument. Scepticism was absent from this list as was the case in all Vuillemin’s texts before his 1980s classificatory books. How could such an absence not be considered as a lack? The reason can be found in a thetic conception of philosophical systems which was accompanied in Jules Vuillemin’s work by a logical formulation of philosophical conflicts. In the 1980s, Vuillemin gave up first-order modal logic—a demonstration tool for theses—and adopted the analysis of linguistic attitudes as an underlying language for his classification. He thereby stopped restricting the notion of the system to assertive or ``thetic’’ systems—realism, conceptualism, nominalism and intuitionism—thus opening the doors of his classification to scepticism.