China & East Asia · c. 320–250 BCE
Gongsun Long
Disputer famous for “a white horse is not a horse”
Argued that a term for a compound (“white horse”) is not the same as a term for a kind (“horse”), probing how names pick out attributes and things.
Life and thought
Gongsun Long, from the state of Zhao, lived roughly 320–250 BCE and was a retainer of Lord Pingyuan, a powerful Zhao prince. Early sources record him urging kings to lay down their arms, an echo of Mohist ideas. Of the book under his name, a handful of chapters survive, and scholars debate how many are genuinely his.
He is famous for the thesis that “a white horse is not a horse”. If you ask for a horse, a yellow or a black one will do; if you ask for a white horse, they will not. So what the term “white horse” picks out differs from what “horse” picks out, and the two terms cannot be identical. In another dialogue he argues that hardness and whiteness in a stone are separate, since sight gives the white but not the hard, and touch the hard but not the white. Xunzi and the Zhuangzi dismissed such arguments as sophistry; twentieth-century scholars read them anew as early Chinese reflection on reference, kinds and logic.
Works
Shaped by
c. 370–310 BCEHui ShiBoth were leading disputers; no meeting or teaching is recorded, so this marks a shared line of argument rather than a documented contact.Meanwhile, in other traditions
c. 371–287 BCETheophrastusAristotle’s successor at the Lyceum and founder of botanyc. 360–270 BCEPyrrhoFounder of Pyrrhonian skepticism, who went to India with Alexander341–270 BCEEpicurusFounder of the Garden, a philosophical community near Athensc. 334–262 BCEZeno of CitiumMerchant from Cyprus who founded Stoicism in Athensc. 279–206 BCEChrysippusThird head of the Stoa, its great systematiser and logicianOn the record
Hui Shi is shown as an influence on Gongsun Long.
Both are counted among the disputers (bianzhe) and the later tradition groups them as the School of Names, but no source records that they met or that Gongsun Long learned from Hui Shi. The tie marks a shared line of argument, not a documented contact.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “School of Names”