Gongsun Longzi

The chief surviving text of the School of Names, a small group of Warring States logicians preoccupied with the relationship between words and the things they designate. Its most famous argument, 'a white horse is not a horse,' is not the sophistic trick it can sound like: Gongsun Long distinguishes the class term 'horse' from the compound term 'white horse,' which specifies both shape and color, and uses the distinction to probe whether general categories can ever fully capture particular things. Only the 'Baima Lun' (White Horse Discourse) is widely treated as plausibly Gongsun Long's own late Warring States work; A.C. Graham's influential textual analysis argues the other surviving essays, the 'Tongbian Lun,' 'Jianbai Lun,' and 'Mingshi Lun,' were assembled later from Later Mohist Canon material and carry errors that postdate the historical Gongsun Long, with some scholars, citing Tang-era taboo characters in the text, arguing for a compilation date as late as the 7th century AD. Largely dismissed by rival schools in its own time as clever wordplay useless for governing, the text nonetheless preserves the most sustained early Chinese engagement with problems of reference, predication, and universals.