 Despite their obscurity, at least some of the theses attributed to Hui Shi and a few of the other paradoxes and sophistries collected in “Under Heaven” probably grow out of legitimate theoretical issues and are of genuine philosophical interest. By contrast, when we turn to Gongsun Long, we encounter a disputer who may have been devoted to sophistry purely for sophistry’s sake. We cannot be sure of this, of course, but what we can say is that Gongsun Long won fame by advocating a claim that any competent speaker of his language would have judged obviously false, namely that “a white horse is not a horse.” 