Gōngsūn Lóng 公孫龍

(c. 325–250 BCE) Warring States thinker traditionally associated with the míngjiā (‘School of Names’). He is renowned as a clever logician, defending paradoxes such as ‘a white horse is not a horse’ through arguments that remain both interesting and puzzling. Although the relationship between the historical Gōngsūn Lóng and the received Gōngsūnlóngzǐ remains controversial, his ideas about the relationship between names (míng) and realities (shí) are directly relevant to early discussions of logic in general, and to the Mòjīng in particular.