Gongsun Long used compact paradoxes about names, kinds, and attributes to test ordinary classificatory judgments and the relation between language and things.
Intellectual setting
The received Gongsun Longzi is textually complex, and scholarship distinguishes its possible early core from later editorial or interpretive layers.
Key ideas
White horse discourse
The claim that a white horse is not a horse distinguishes a named kind from the conjunction of a color and an animal term.
Names and distinctions
His arguments force attention to how sameness, difference, and predication operate in practical and philosophical speech.
Legacy
His paradoxes remain central evidence for debates about logic, language, and disputation in early Chinese philosophy.
Scholarly notes
The received Gongsun Longzi · resolved
The book that carries his name is textually complex, and scholarship distinguishes a possible early core from later editorial and interpretive layers; the white horse and hard-and-white arguments cannot simply be read as a fourth-century BCE author's own words.