Shared questions
- How do names and distinctions successfully track things, relations, and changing circumstances?
Internal disagreements
- Whether paradox exposes a defect in ordinary language, a feature of reality, or a need for more precise distinctions.
Key texts
- Gongsun Longzi — The received text, containing the white horse and hard-and-white arguments, has a disputed relation to any fourth-century original.
- The Ten Theses of Hui Shi — Preserved only in the Under Heaven chapter of the Zhuangzi, without the arguments that supported them.
Scholarly notes
A school assembled by later bibliographers · resolved
The School of Names is a taxonomical fiction, since the figures assigned to it never formed a circle or shared a doctrine or way of life, and their interests overlapped with the later Mohists, the Zhuangzi and Xunzi as much as with each other.