 The later Mohists may well have been the first in the world to attempt to furnish a systematic philosophical treatment of intensionality. An abundance of evidence suggests that they were aware of both the pervasiveness of intensional phenomena in natural language and the way in which these phenomena tend to frustrate the view that natural language meaning is essentially compositional in structure (Willman 2010). They were probably also aware not only of the distinction between intensions and extensions, but also of the way in which this distinction may be essential to the determination of the truth or admissibility of sentences involving intensional contexts. Moreover, they do not seem to have made any attempt to explain away these contexts in terms of basic semantic principles, by denying that they exist, or by asserting that they can be reduced to, or explained in terms of, other more philosophically admissible modes of expression. On the contrary, they not only embraced intensionality as a fundamental feature of language, but also attempted to exploit it for the purpose of advancing their philosophical views, particularly their views on ethics.