Gongsun Long

Gongsun Long belonged to the School of Names, the nearest thing classical China had to formal logic. His most notorious argument claims that a white horse is not a horse, because the term white horse picks out something the term horse does not. Critics called it sophistry; defenders saw a genuine probe into how words, kinds, and things hang together. Working amid the debating halls of the age, he forced his contemporaries to notice that the way we name the world is not the same as the world, a distinction Chinese thought never entirely forgot.