 The Canons, their accompanying Explanations, and other later Mohist writings are among the most important texts in the history of Chinese ethics, philosophy of language, epistemology, logic, and science. They present elements of a sophisticated semantic theory, epistemology, consequentialist ethics, and theory of analogical argumentation, along with intriguing discussions of causality, space and time, and mereological ontology. Also recorded are inquiries in such diverse fields as geometry, mechanics, optics, and economics. The writers put forward terse, rigorous arguments that develop and defend Mohist ideas and rebut opponents’ views. The texts yield a rich taste of an approach to language, mind, and knowledge distinct from those dominant in the Western philosophical tradition. At the same time, by shedding light on technical notions employed in other ancient writings, they confirm that a grasp of early theories of language, knowledge, and argumentation is essential to a full understanding of classical Chinese thought. Indeed, the later Mohists decisively refute the once widespread view that ancient Chinese thinkers were concerned exclusively with ethics, moral psychology, and nature mysticism and uninterested in language, epistemology, and logic. 