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.
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Notes
- 1.
Han History 30, “Bibliographical Record,” records two scrolls of writings attributed to Deng Xi, one to Yin Wen, one to Hui Shi, and fourteen to Gongsun Long. None of the writings attributed to Deng Xi, Yin Wen, or Hui Shi survives. Two short texts called Dengxizi and Yinwenzi exist, but the majority scholarly opinion is that these are much later forgeries, not genuine Warring States texts. The extant version of the Gongsun Longzi contains only six scrolls, not fourteen, one of which is a collection of anecdotes cobbled together from other early sources. For further discussion, see (Harbsmeier 1998).
- 2.
Citations to the Xunzi give chapter and line numbers in (Xunzi 1966).
- 3.
Citations to the Zhuangzi give chapter and line numbers in (Zhuangzi 1956).
- 4.
Of the five discourses in the extant Gongsun Longzi, the authenticity of two and a half is disputed. Graham argues that the second half of the third discourse and both of the last two are post-Han forgeries, pieced together partly from misunderstood bits of the Mohist Canons (Graham 1990: 125–215). For an opposing view of the text’s status, see (Fung 2000). For brevity, since the first two discourses present Gongsun’s two most prominent paradoxes, I will discuss only those two.
- 5.
See, for example, Zhuangzi 17/66; Xunzi 2/30, 8/34; Annals 17.2. Citations to the Annals of Lü Buwei give section numbers in (Knoblock and Riegel 2000).
- 6.
For a detailed discussion, see (Fraser 2016).
- 7.
For details, see Annals 16.8 and Zhuangzi 33/33–41.
- 8.
See Mozi 44/17. Citations to Mozi give section and line numbers in (Mozi1956).
- 9.
The two construals hinge on different interpretations of the word qing 情 (facts, conditions, affective states). Xunzi takes it to refer to people’s constitution or actual feelings. Song and Yin seem to take it to refer to what is genuine or inherent. Both construals reflect common uses of qing.
- 10.
References to the Mohist Canons (the first four of the Mohist dialectical books) follow the numbering system in (Graham 1978).
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
Zhuangzi 2/22. This part of the Zhuangzi also cites paradoxes suggestive of theses 3 and 10 (Zhuangzi 2/51–53) and uses phrasing similar to thesis 4 (Zhuangzi 2/28) but without attributing these to Hui Shi.
- 14.
Hu Shi may have been the first to advance this view (Hu 1922).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
One early, influential interpretation took its theme to be denying the identity of the universals “horse” and “white horse” (Feng 1958; Cheng 1983). Other interpretations have taken it to deal with kind and identity relations (Cikoski 1975; Harbsmeier 1998), part-whole relations (Hansen 1983; Graham 1989), how the extensions of phrases vary from those of their constituent terms (Hansen 1992), and even the use/mention distinction (Thompson 1995). For recent discussions, see (Fung 2007), (Im 2007), (Mou 2007), (Lucas 2012), (Solomon 2013), and (Fraser 2015). For overviews of competing interpretations, see (Hansen 2007), (Cheng 2007), and (Fung 2014). For interpretations which, like that presented here, question the enterprise of interpreting “white horse” as a serious piece of philosophical inquiry, see (Harbsmeier 1998) and (Trauzettel 1999).
- 18.
I adopt this view from (Harbsmeier 1998: 302).
- 19.
Citations to the Gongsun Longzi give index numbers in (Lau et al. 1998).
- 20.
From Kong Congzi, Book 12. See (Graham 1989: 84).
- 21.
This approach to Gongsun Long’s arguments follows (Harbsmeier 1998: 300–301).
- 22.
The text appears faulty here. I have followed Harbsmeier’s proposed emendation (Harbsmeier 1998: 307, n2).
- 23.
“White horses” has been emended to “horses” here to cohere with the first clause in the sophist’s next sentence.
- 24.
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Fraser, C. (2020). Paradoxes in the School of Names. In: Fung, Ym. (eds) Dao Companion to Chinese Philosophy of Logic. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29033-7_16
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