Gongsun Long

Gongsun Long
公孫龍
Portrait of Gongsun Long by an unknown artist – National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Born	c. 320 BC
Died	250 BC
Notable work	Gongsun Longzi (公孫龍子)
Era	Ancient Chinese philosophy
School	School of Names
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	公孫龍
Simplified Chinese	公孙龙
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Gōngsūn Lóng Wade–Giles Kung1-sun1 Lung2
Alternative Chinese name
Chinese	子秉
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zibǐng Wade–Giles Tzŭ3-ping3

Gongsun Long (c. 320 – 250 BC^[1][2]), courtesy name Zibing, was a Chinese philosopher, writer, and member of the School of Names, also known as the Logicians, of ancient Chinese philosophy. Gongsun ran a school and received patronage from rulers, advocating peaceful means of resolving disputes amid the martial culture of the Warring States period. His collected works comprise the Gongsun Longzi (公孫龍子) anthology. Comparatively few details are known about his life, and much of his work has been lost—only six of the fourteen essays he originally authored are still extant.^[3]

In book 17 of the Zhuangzi, Gongsun speaks of himself:

When young, I studied the way of the former kings. When I grew up, I understood the practice of kindness and duty. I united the same and different, separated hard from white, made so the not-so and admissible the inadmissible. I confounded the wits of the hundred schools and exhausted the eloquence of countless speakers. I took myself to have reached the ultimate.

He is best known for a series of paradoxes in the tradition of Hui Shi, including "white horses are not horses", "when no thing is not the pointed-out, to point out is not to point out", and "there is no 1 in 2". These paradoxes seem to suggest a similarity to the discovery in Greek philosophy that pure logic may lead to apparently absurd conclusions.