Paradoxes in the School of Names

Abstract

In the Chinese tradition, the earliest and most well-known paradoxes are ascribed to figures associated with the “School of Names” (ming jia 名家), a diverse group of Warring States thinkers who shared an interest in language, logic, and metaphysics. Their investigations led some of these thinkers to propound various puzzling, paradoxical statements that seem intended to highlight fundamental features of reality or subtleties in semantic relations between words and things. This chapter interprets and discusses paradoxes associated with Deng Xi, Yin Wen, Hui Shi, Gongsun Long, and other dialecticians as recorded in three major sources, the Xunzi, Zhuangzi, and Gongsun Longzi. Many of the paradoxes twist commonsense distinctions of sameness or difference or exploit how judgments of similarity or difference are sensitive to changes in scale or perspective. In some cases, paradoxes “separate hard from white,” or treat different, compresent features of things as separate entities, as if we were to treat the hardness and whiteness of a white stone as two distinct objects. Several paradoxes seem to follow from properties of the “dimensionless,” a pre-Han term referring to a geometric point.