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The Gongsun Longzi

Gongsun Long·c. 280 BCE·Chinese·fragmentary

About this text

The surviving fragments of the School of Names, including the famous dialogue arguing that a white horse is not a horse. The text probes how words, kinds, and things relate, the nearest classical China came to formal logic.

"Is it admissible that a white horse is not a horse?" "It is." "How can that be?" "Horse is that by which we name the shape. White is that by which we name the colour. What names the colour is not what names the shape. Therefore I say: a white horse is not a horse."

"If someone seeks a horse, a yellow or a black horse may answer to it. If someone seeks a white horse, a yellow or a black horse may not. Thus yellow and black horses are one and the same in answering for horse, yet cannot answer for white horse. It is clear, then: white horse is not horse."

"A horse certainly has colour; that is why there are white horses. If horses had no colour there would be horse as such and nothing more — how then could one pick out a white one? Therefore white horse is not horse: it is horse joined together with white."

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