Asian Philosophies | School of Names: "A White Horse is Not a Horse"

Our new schedule is every Saturday 4:00pm Pacific (7:00pm East)

Please read Feng YouLan's "A Short History of Chinese Philosophy", Chapter 8, "The School of Names" pp. 80 ~ 92

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.260423/page/n103/mode/2up

our discord channel https://discord.gg/e39JDhFkyQ

The “White Horse Discourse” has spawned nearly as many interpretations as there are interpreters. One early, influential interpretation took its theme to be denying the identity of the universals ‘horse’ and ‘white horse’. There is now a fairly broad consensus, at least among European and American scholars, that the text is unlikely to concern universals, since no ancient Chinese philosopher held a realist doctrine of universals. Other interpretations have taken it to deal with kind and identity relations, part-whole relations, how the extensions of phrases vary from those of their constituent terms, and even the use/mention distinction.

he “School of Names” is the traditional Chinese label for a diverse group of Warring States (479–221 B.C.E.) thinkers who shared an interest in language, disputation, and metaphysics. They were notorious for logic-chopping, purportedly idle conceptual puzzles, and paradoxes such as “A white horse is not a horse.” Because reflection on language in ancient China centered on “names” and their relation to “stuff”, 2nd-century B.C.E. Han dynasty archivists dubbed these thinkers the “School of Names,” one of six recognized philosophical movements. The “school” is a taxonomical fiction, however. The varied figures assigned to it—Deng Xi, Yin Wen, Hui Shi, and Gongsun Long, among others—never formed a distinct circle or movement devoted to any particular doctrine or way of life, and their intellectual interests overlapped extensively with those of the later Mohists, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi. Several of these men were active politically: Hui Shi was a government minister, Yin Wen and Gongsun Long political advisors and peace activists. Still, in the eyes of Han historians, they devoted themselves to no signature ethical or political doctrines. Hence they became known primarily for their interest in language and disputation and on that basis were deemed a “school.”

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Our Schedule:
2022-01-15: The Great Learning
2022-01-22: Mo Tzu, The First Opponent of Confucius
2022-01-29: Yang Zhu (Yang Chu) - The Phase of Taoism
2022-02-05: The School of Names
2022-02-12: The Later Mohists
2022-02-19: The Yin-Yang School and Chinese Cosmogony
2022-02-26: Confucianist Metaphysics
2022-03-05: World Politics and World Philosophy

Please see out past and future meetup:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1moDzDM4xb--hDgw7zXC7Rrayq-GEwQYETyJKa4W9usU/edit?usp=sharing