From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist dialectics: Chinese interpretations of Gongsun Longzi as a text and source of Chinese logic, 1919–1937

This article aims at providing a general overview of the development of interpretational discourse on Gongsun Longzi (公孫龍子) as a text in Chinese logic in the timeframe between the May Fourth events in 1919 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. In my attempt to highlight the main interpretational approaches to the text and philosophy of Gongsun Long (公孫龍, 320 BC-250 BC) I will, on one hand, focus on the question whether or how the Western philosophies and notions of logic, such as for instance that of pragmatism, analytic philosophy and dialectical materialism, influenced the above-mentioned interpretations. On the other hand, aside from its contextual evolution I will also try to cast some new light on the main milestones of its textual re-emergence and development in the early Republican period.


Introduction
The present study sets out from the emergence of Hu Shi's theory of origins and development of "ancient Chinese logical method," which, as I will try to show, was intimately related to pragmatism and experimental logic. Subsequently, I will also try to analyze the pivotal role of the work Gongsun Longzi in the discourse on Chinese logic in the 1920s and 1930s. The reemergence of the text in the 1920s was namely pivotal for the development of the modern idea of Chinese logic (also referred to as mingxue 名學 or bianxue 辯學) and particularly central to the 1 3 contemporary debate on the genealogical relation between (neo-)Mohist dialectics (Mobian 墨辯) and the School of Names (Mingjia 名家). The motion that Gongsun Long did not belong to the orthodox Mohist school of Chinese logic, which emerged in the later stage of the debates, has namely opened up the possibility that the Gongsun Longzi had in fact contained a different, more advanced variety of logic compared to that of Mohists. In the later parts of the article, I will also expound on how the above-mentioned debates caused, initially, a rise in reproduction of older (mainly Qing dynasty) commentaries and editions of the text, and, in turn, a modern reinvention of Chinese tradition in newly written commentaries on the text. Finally, I will also examine how the spread of ideas from modern Western philosophy and modern notions of logic affected the trends in interpretations of the text and how, in confluence of a constantly shifting notion of Chinese logic, it slowly assumed the post at the forefront of the discourse on Chinese logic in Marxist circles and in circles of philosophers associated with Western analytic philosophy-in particular the Department of Philosophy at National Qinghua University.
In contemporary studies on Chinese logic, both in China and in the West, the logical nature and historical placement of Gongsun Longzi are still a subject of ongoing debates. In last two decades alone, more than 100 articles on Gongsun Long were published in China, and around 90 on mingxue 名學 ("learning of names" or "Chinese logic"). The recent decade also saw a rise in number of Western studies of the Gongsun Longzi as a text about Chinese logic, philosophy of language as well as studies on its long textual history. 1 As regards the historical perspective on the text and its significance as an example of "ancient Chinese logic," in recent years the most advanced and extensive study on the pre-Republican history of the notion of Chinese logic has been given in the book The Discovery of Chinese Logic by Joachim Kurtz. Even though the book focuses on the historical origins, entanglement and coevolution between the notions of Western and Chinese logic in China before 1911, in the epilogue the author offered a condensed yet still lucid introduction to the developments in the Republican period, while in the main part of the text Professor Kurtz already studied the main figureheads, who decisively contributed to the development of discourse on Gongsun Long and the School of Names (Mingjia 名家) in the early 1920s (Kurtz 2011, pp. 340-365). 2 Nonetheless, in the recent past, neither in China nor in the West a separate historical overview has been published, which would focus only on the interpretations of Gongsun Longzi in the 1 3 From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist… period between the May Fourth movement (1919) and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, a period of major significance for the future developments of the idea of Chinese logic and interpretation of Gongsun Long in China. 3 These circumstances are also the main reason why I decided to write the following, albeit admittingly somehow terse and superficial, overview of the development of the Gongsun Longzi as a text and source of Chinese logic between 1920 and 1937.

Textual reemergence in the Shadow of Pragmatism, 1920s
Hu Shi: Gongsun Long, neo-Mohism and experimental logic in the early 1920s Maybe the most influential and certainly the most widely discussed interpretation of Gongsun Long in 1920s China was proposed by Hu Shi 胡適 (also known as Suh Hu, 1891Hu, -1962, a professor of philosophy at Peking University, one of the most important intellectuals of the time (Dessein 2020, p. 252), and the leading Chinese proponent of pragmatism (Kang 2020, p. 130). Hu's views on logic in ancient Chinese philosophy developed while he was a doctoral student of philosophy at Columbia University, in the years between September 1915 andApril 1917. In his formative years in the United States, Hu developed a lifelong interest for pragmatist philosophy, especially the writings of the renowned professor at Columbia University, John Dewey, who eventually also became his mentor and doctoral supervisor. Eventually, Dewey's book Essays in Experimental Logic (1916) led Hu to the discovery that a special kind of logical method might have been developed in ancient Chinese philosophy, similar to the "experimental logic" of Dewey. Before long (1915), Hu located its potential source in the work Mozi 墨子 and the writings of Gongsun Long from the Warring States Period . 4 Consequently, Hu decided to devote his doctoral studies at Columbia to the noble task of constructing a theoretical bridge between the scientific truth he believed to have found in American pragmatism on the one hand and the rediscovered potential foundations of Chinese modernity on the other. In Hu's opinion, the fecund soil on which such an "organic 3 This has been discussed in various general surveys on history of Chinese logic or history of logic in China. Liang Qichao's and Hu Shi's contribution to the development of "Chinese logic" have been, for example, studied in Wen Gongyi 温公颐 and Cui Qingtian's 崔清田 A Course in the History of Logic in China (2001, pp. 322-350), Volume 4 of the History of Chinese Logic edited by Li Kuangwu 李匡武, and written by Zhou Yunzhi 周云之 and Zhou Wenying 周文英 (1989, pp. 252-278) or in Zhou Yunzhi's recapitulation of the earlier series History of Chinese Logic from 2004. The interpretations from 1920s and 1930s are also fragmentarily or briefly discussed in studies like Cui Qingtian's philosophical treatise Mingxue yu bianxue (1997a) and his Xianxue chongguang: Jin-xiandai de xian-Qin Mojia yanjiu (1997b), Zhou Yunzhi's Gongsun Longzi zhengming xueshuo yanjiu: jiaoquan, jinyi, pouxi, zonglun (1994), Huang Kejian's 黃克劍 Mingjia qici shujie: Hui Shi Gongsun Long yanjiu (2010) etc. Chinese studies in Hui Shi and Gongsun Long in the period following the founding of the PRC are briefly summarized in Guo Qiyong's Studies on Contemporary Chinese Philosophy, 1949-2009.

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link" between modern civilization of the West and Chinese tradition could be established were China's long forgotten, if not intentionally suppressed, philosophical teachings, especially that of Mohism, as China's most extensive repository of logical methodology. Hu's early intellectual endeavours to rehabilitate Chinese traditional identity were ultimate epitomised in his doctoral thesis entitled The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China (1917). When in 1922 the original (English) version of his dissertation was published in Shanghai, the book became the first treatise devoted to the study of Chinese "logical method" in English language.
As a leading member of the New Culture Movement, Hu Shi was also an opponent of Confucianism, in which he recognised the main cause for the centuries-long demise of Chinese "scientific" tradition. Thus, as he remarked in the introduction to his dissertation, one of his main objectives in writing the book was also to emancipate the real essence of Chinese philosophy "from the moralistic and rationalistic fetters of Confucianism." (Hu 1922, p. 8) However, in order to gain a better understanding of what Hu was actually implying in the above passage, as well as what he had in mind when he spoke about "logical method" in ancient Chinese philosophy, we must look back into the writings of his mentor John Dewey, in which, when observed carefully, we can locate the main theoretical background for the great majority of Hu's meditations on Chinese logic in early 1920s. 5 One possible reason why Dewey's ideas made such a great impression on Hu was their proximity to the comprehensive, inter-subjective reasoning which can be found in traditional Chinese philosophy. Hu might also have recognised the commonality between pragmatism and some schools of ancient Chinese philosophy in their 5 Hu's theoretical foundation was Dewey's Essays on Experimental Logic (1916) (translated into Chinese in 1920). In summary, Dewey devised the idea of experimental logic on his epistemological premise that human reflection plays an intermediary role in generation of experience, which in turn constitutes the main building-block of knowledge. (Dewey 1916, pp. 1-2) Beside the fact that there is not only one type of experience, the experience is a relative thing, which depends greatly on several aspects of the ever-changing reality, such as for example, the temporal aspect. For Dewey, this entailed that the "distinctions and relations in logical theories" are derived from specific timeframes and, in rigid, rationalist philosophies tend to be ad hoc generalised to all other states of affairs. (Ibid.) Another shortcoming of such logical theories consists in artificially applying the thus established rationalist notion of thought upon one's experiences. However, in Dewey's pragmatism, experience and rational reflection must be "active and progressive," (ibid., p. 10) while the concrete circumstances of active reflection must be constantly re-examined. As the main method of reflection, logic must therefore abide closely by the vicissitudes of the state of affairs. Finally, in Dewey's eyes, another important trait of human knowledge would also affect such dynamic form of logic: the fact that "knowing always has a particular purpose." Thus, both human thought and method arise from practical needs and its method must be constantly reapplied in concrete situations, in which its effectiveness (objectiveness) is also confirmed (Ibid., pp. 12-3). The term "experimental logic" derives its meaning from this very point. Regarding other kinds of logic, Dewey pointed out that in the early 1910s studies of logic in philosophical field was still in grip of idealism, and therefore the "logics in vogue were profoundly influenced by Kantian and post-Kantian thought." On the other hand, "empirical logics, those conceived under the influence of Mill, still existed, but their light was diminished by the radiance of the regnant idealism." However, Dewey did not view empirical logic in a way less critical than the "idealist" variety of logic. In fact, he recognised its greatest "fault" in its adoption of the same mistake than idealism, namely "taking sense-data to be primitive" and not recognising the role of (a comprehensive idea of) human "intelligence in creating new meanings." In the concluding chapters of his Essays Dewey also expressed a critical attitude towards the so-called "analytical logic" of Bertrand Russell (Ibid., p. 25).

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From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist… mutual emphasis on an incessantly changing (bian 變) universe, 6 which demands constant revision of general circumstantial tendencies (shi 勢) and hence also practical realignment with the states of affairs. In his doctoral dissertation Hu recognised such an "experimental" logical method in the philosophical discussions of the Warring States Period, in particular Mohism. 7 At the same time, he seemed to indicate that the absence of a formalised logical methodology in ancient Chinese philosophy was a consequence of its fundamentally pragmatical disposition.

Gongsun Long and Mohism
Since Hu was a strong adherent of pragmatism, we may assume that his notion of ancient Chinese philosophy as a form of proto-pragmatism was further reinforced by the fact that in the Warring States period all schools of philosophy, from Confucianism to Daoism and Mohism had been focusing on the problem of relationship between language (ming 名) and reality (shi 實). It was from this very basis that each school developed its own "theory of names," mingxue 名學, which later became the term describing Chinese "logic". 8 In his studies of mingxue, Hu not only regarded Mohism as the most advanced example of such "logical method," but later also concluded that Mohist philosophy constituted the source of "proto-pragmatical" thinking in Chinese philosophy (Hu 1919a I, pp. 8-9) Maybe the most important claim, and most certainly the one which later was to reverberate the most among Chinese philosophers, was his interpretation of the authorship of certain parts of the Mozi, and his consequent revision of the inner genealogy of Mohist school of philosophy. Indicating that the bulk of the 53 chapters collected under the title Mozi probably were not written by the founder of the school, Mo Di himself, but his later adherents Hu Shi reintroduced the notion of "other Mohists," Biemo 別墨, or neo-Mohists, as already mentioned in the Zhuangzi 莊子 (Zhuangzi 33/2: 10). But Hu did not stop there. Subsequently, echoing the suspicions of the late-Qing commentator Sun Yirang, 9 he emphasized that six books 6 He referred to this aspect of Chinese philosophy as "the theories of natural and social evolution in ancient China" (Hu 1922, p. 10). 7 Hu conceded that, in spite of the negative effect of Confucianism, later a close approximation to Western logical method was also developed in the neo-Confucian philosophy of Song and Ming dynasties, however, the logical method related to "the investigation into things" (gewu 格物) "was rendered fruitless" because of its "lack of experimental procedure," "its failure to recognize the active and directing role played by the mind" in experimental investigation of reality and "its construction of 'things' to mean 'affairs'" (Hu 1922, p. 8). 8 However, in the introductory chapter of his monograph Zhexue yu lunli 哲學與論理 (Philosophy and Logic) entitled "The Threads of Chinese Philosophy" (Zhongguo zhexue de xiansuo 中國哲學的綫索), a collection of writings by different authors introducing the main tenets of pragmatism, experimental logic and the epistemological bases of the view on life (renshenguan 人生觀), Hu Shi admitted that mingxue 名學 is not exactly the same as Western logic (Hu et al. 1925, p. 3). 9 Previously, the authorship of four of the above-listed books of Mozi was also questioned by the late-Qing scholar Sun Yirang 孫詒讓 (1848-1908, who in 1877 composed his Intermittent Glosses on Mozi (Mozi xiangu 墨子閒詁).
(liupian 六篇) from book 32 to 37, 10 represented the heart of Mohist learning on logic, and had been written by the members of the neo-Mohist school. Characterized by their profound use of both logical and scientific contents, these six chapters also became known as Mohist dialectics (Mobian 墨辯) (See Sun Yirang 1935).
Most importantly, because Hu saw the content of the dialectical chapters as a commentary on Mozi's teaching on "hard and white" (jian bai 堅白) and "identity and difference" (tong yi 同異), this also led him to the conclusion that the group of philosophers from the Warring States period known as the "dialecticians" (bianzhe 辯者) and collectively also referred to as the School of Names (mingjia 名家), who focused on the same question, were nothing more but a later outgrowth of the neo-Mohist school. Following an analysis of both proto-Mohist and neo-Mohist texts Hu also closely examined the remnants of the "logical method" of Gongsun Long and Hui Shi, establishing that the paradoxes spoken about by the members of the so-called School of Names can be classified into four main theoretical categories: (i) infinity of time and space, (ii) potentiality and actuality, (iii) principle of individuation and (iv) theory of knowledge. Moreover, in Hu's opinion, all the remaining chapters of the Gongsun Longzi as well as the paradoxes of Hui Shi "can find collateral illustrations in these six chapters, and that they can be understood only in light of these collateral illustrations…" 11 At the same time, he concluded that, in some aspects, the reasoning contained of Gongsun Longzi, in particular in the famous Baimalun 白馬論, had critically departed from the original teaching on form (xing 形) as expounded in the six chapters. 12 Finally, he also needed to explain why Mohism and its incredibly advanced studies on the logical method would eventually sink into oblivion. Apart from the obstructive influences of the political elite and the rival Confucian school, Hu partially found blame also in the alleged logicians of the Neo-Mohist schools like Gongsun Long, who transformed the original Mohist teachings into highly unintelligible sophisms (guibian 詭辯). In consequence, in the ages to follow Mohist "logic" (mingxue 名學) became associated with the paradoxes of these "late-Mohist sophists".

Hu Shi's later work: Mohist logic and historical perspectives of Chinese philosophy
Soon after Hu returned to his homeland in July 1917, he assumed the post of a professor of philosophy at the prestigious National Peking University. Almost immediately, together with Jiang Menglin (蔣夢麟, 1886-1964) a fellow doctoral student from 1 3 From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist… Columbia, he initiated a campaign propagating pragmatism in China. 13 Their efforts intensified when, on the invitation of Peking University, Dewey finally visited China in 1919. Consequently, in five years following 1919, Hu authored a series of writings introducing the central tenets of pragmatist philosophy and its scientific method. 14 Concurrently with his public propagation of pragmatist ideas, Hu Shi pursued his studies in history of Chinese philosophy. By 1919, he managed to supplement and extend his pragmatist notion of Chinese philosophical past and write up the first volume of Outline [of the] History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexueshi dagang 中國哲學史大綱). In the part of his influential Outline dealing with Gongsun Long and Hui Shi he reiterated the ideas from his dissertation, emphasizing the importance of dialectical writings of the six books as the most advanced ancient Chinese work on modern logic, while Gongsun Long and Hui Shi were described as mere examples of sophistic commentary on the former. First publication, in which Hu's views on Gongsun Long and Chinese logical method were revealed to Chinese readership, can probably be traced back to two articles on "Philosophy of Hui Shi and Gongsun Long" (Hui Shi Gongsun Long zhi zhexue 惠施公孫龍之哲學) that appeared in the Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi 東方雜志) in 1918 (Hu 1918). 15 Otherwise, in Hu Shi's expositions of Chinese philosophy, Gongsun Long and therewith also the existence of a School of Names remained in the long shadow of his idea of Mohist school of philosophy, which was revived in the process of his search for the inherently pragmatic and scientific nature of Chinese classical logic. 16 13 Jiang earned his PhD in education sciences from Columbia University. His doctoral supervisor was also Dewey. While, in their propagation of American pragmatism Hu focused on general scientific traits of pragmatist philosophy, such as its logical method and epistemology, Jiang oversaw the propagation of pragmatist (Dewey's) philosophy of education. For the same purpose, he also founded the New Education (Xin jiaoyu 新教育) journal, which served as one of the key launching platforms for dissemination of pragmatist ideas. Like Hu, in the time of Dewey's stay in China, Jiang was working at Peking University (from Summer 1919 on), the initial official host-institution of Dewey's visit in China. 14 For example, in 1919, Hu published a short propaedeutic booklet entitled Pragmatism (Shiyan zhuyi 實驗主義). In the same year, Hu also published a series of articles discussing William James, Dewey's pragmatism and experimental method in influential Chinese periodicals like the New Youth (Xin qingnian 新青年), New China (Xin Zhongguo 新中國), Weekly Review (Meizhou pinglun 每周評論), Shangzhi 尚 志 etc. For the same reason in 1919 excerpts from Dewey's Essays in Experimental Logic were translated into Chinese and published in leading Chinese journals. Subsequently, in 1920, Liu Boming's (劉 伯明) and Shen Zhensheng's (沈振聲) translation of the entire book was published by the Taidong book company in Shanghai. Later, several attempts at introducing experimental logic were also made in the framework of Science and Metaphysics Debate (Kexue yu xuanxue 科學與玄學, originally also called the debate on Science and the View on Life, Kexue yu renshengguan 科學與人生觀). E.g.: Ci Xin 慈心. "Jindai lunlixue de qushi 近代論理學底趨勢 (Trends in Contemporary Science of Logic)". In : Hu Shi 胡適 et al. (au.), Jiaoyu zazhi she 教育雜志社 ed. Zhexue yu lunli 哲學與論理 (Philosophy and Logic). Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1925, pp. 67-97. In the late 1920s, another strain of American pragmatist logic, Ladd-Franklin's theory of "antilogism," was introduced by Shen Youqian (沈有乾, 1899-?), whose main fields of interest at the time, however, were psychology and education science. 15 This was the first draft of the subchapter on Hui Shi and Gongsun Long from his Outline, and a slightly modified translation of the chapter from his dissertation. 16 How important Mohist philosophy was to Hu Shi at the time was further illustrated by the fact that, especially between 1918 and 1922, most of Hu's public and academic lectures were devoted to Mohist philosophy and logic. In 1920, for instance, the Academic Lecture Association (Xueshu jiangyan hui 學 術講演會) published the transcript of Hu's lectures on Mohist Philosophy (Mojia zhexue 墨家哲學) (Hu 1920), which was a summary of his Outline (1919b, pp. 144-250). Before the English version of Hu's

Responses to Hu Shi: Liang Qichao and the debate on "Mohist dialectics"
In the May Fourth period, neither Hu Shi's propagation of pragmatism nor his interpretation of history of Chinese philosophy went unchallenged. As a matter of fact, the movement for advancement of pragmatism in China that started in the wake of Dewey's visit in China, represented the pinnacle of a decade-long process of "Americanization" of Chinese system of education in cohesion with a constant influx of pragmatist philosophy of education. A significant attempt to counter this "Americanization" of China came from the group of intellectuals led by the renowned Chinese scholar Liang Qichao (梁啓超, courtesy name Zhuoru 卓如, alias Rengong 任公, 1873-1929) (Levenson 1953, p. 201). As a countermeasure, the president of Peking University, Cai Yuanpei, the leader of the Progressive Party, Liang Qichao and others invited the renowned British philosopher and mathematical logician Bertrand Russell.
Hu Shi's ideas related to Chinese philosophy were addressed in discussions parallel to the central discourse on Western science and philosophy. Thus, already in 1922, Liang Qichao published his interpretation of the Mohist canon (Mojing 墨 經) entitled The Mohist Canon-Collated and Annotated (Mojing jiaoshi 墨經校 釋). Even though the book epitomised two decades of Liang's scholarship on the text Mozi, the work also contained a special chapter in which Liang commented on Hu Shi's interpretation of the authorship of the above-named classic, while in the concluding parts of the book the publisher also appended a foreword written by Hu Shi. 17 In his remarks on Hu's Outline (1919) Liang also touched upon the question of logic in Mohist writings, 18 while at the same time his focus remained mainly on the authorship of the liupian 六篇 or "Mohist dialectics".
It seems that Liang Qichao had partially misunderstood Hu Shi's theory on how Hui Shi and Gongsun Long were connected to the authorship of the neo-Mohist writings. Although in his Outline Hu enunciated that the core of neo-Mohist writings on logic had been written by a "neo-Mohist from the time of Gongsun Long and Hui Shi" (Hu 1919b II, pp. 152, 187), Liang obviously misinterpreted Hu's statement to mean that the above-mentioned texts were written by the "disciples of Hui and Long." 19 Regarding the authorship of the above-mentioned books, Liang maintained Footnote 16 (continued) dissertation was published in 1922, a series of three selected excerpts from the text had been published in the missionary journal The Chinese Recorder   (Hu 1921a, b, c, d). All three excerpts were devoted to "The Logic of Moh Tih and His School." 17 Liang commented on "Jing shang" 經上 and "Jing xia" 經下 and their explanations Jing shuo 經說. Liang's commentary on Hu Shi can be found on pages: 1-25. 18 In general, Liang was sceptical about the alleged scientific nature of the texts described as Mohist dialectics. 19 When Liang recapitulates the four reasons that led Hu to assert that the chapters of Mobian were not authored by Mozi himself, he claims that the fourth reason was: "Because the wording was the same as in Hui Shi and Gongsun Long, it must have been composed by their disciples. 所言與惠施公孫龍相同, 當為惠龍之徒所作" (Liang 1922, p. 3). In his later analysis Liang himself suspected that the followers of Gongsun Long attempted to edit Mohist writings-in particular a part of the "Jing shuo xia" 經說下. This was also how later critics understood Liang.

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From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist… that, even though they all expounded on Mohist "logic" (mingxue 名學), the collection of six books of the Mojing could not be bound together so as to form one consistent discussion. On the contrary, Liang believed that while "Da qu" (大取) and "Xiao qu" (小取) were written by later Mohists, books like "Jing shang" (經上) and "Jing xia" (經下) were almost certainly written by Mozi himself. (Ibid., As a corollary to Liang's objections against Hu Shi's and Sun Yirang's interpretations, it also followed that the link between the logical writings of Gongsun Long and the paradoxes of Hui Shi could also be put under question. Although Liang did not explicitly state that Gongsun Long and Hui Shi had been members of the socalled School of Names, he did not deny its existence (Ibid., p. 6). Moreover, by having severed the genealogical link between the neo-Mohists and texts like Gongsun Longzi, he opened up the possibility that in the Warring States Period there existed more than one lineage of "Chinese logicians" whose focus, however, had been centred on the problematics of form, relations between names and reality and so on. Though these were the same as the problems addressed in the Mojing, Liang also noted that the solutions to these problems given in the Gongsun Longzi were substantially different from that of Mozi and his earlier followers (Ibid., p. 7). 20 In consequence, Liang's criticism also reinstated a sense of textual independence to texts like Gongsun Longzi and in turn also caused the origin of "Chinese logic" to shift from a unified Mohist lineage to the group of philosophers, who could also be described by the generic term Mingjia 名家. In this sense, Gongsun Long's thought was not a mere sophistic outgrowth or misinterpretation of Mozi, as maintained by Hu Shi, but the chief representative of an independent and possibly also a more advanced discourse on "the learning of names" (mingxue 名學) or Chinese variety of logic.
After its original publication with the Commercial Press in 1922, Liang Qichao's The Mohist Canon-Collated and Annotated was reprinted for several times. Already in 1922, its content provoked first critical responses, which revolved mainly around Liang's interpretation of authorship and nature of the content of the so-called six books of Mohist dialectics. Not long after that, a debate on "Mohist dialectics" (Mobian taolun 墨辯討論) broke out, 21 which lasted until the late 1920s. The debate was initiated in 1922 by Luan Tiaofu (欒調甫, 1889-1972, a lecturer of philology at Qilu University (齊魯大學), 22 and the compiler of the Mohist canon Wu Feibai (伍非百, 1890-1965). 23 From the beginning on, Liang Qichao and Hu Shi also took 20 Liang Qichao noted that teachings such as that contained in Gongsun Long's famous Baimalun had not yet been developed in the Mojing. In that way, between them there could only have existed a thematic relationship. In addition, Liang also refrained from claiming that in the past Gongsun Long and Hui Shi had not been also referred to as "neo-Mohists," for deriving from Zhuangzi's use of the name, one could also establish that the Biemo 別墨 were a form of non-orthodox Mohism. 21 In 1926, Luan published an anthology of-mostly his own, contributions to the discussion, which he himself chose to call "The debate on Mohist dialectics." (Luan 1926) 22 Luan was an almost completely self-thought scholar of Mohism and a translator of English, who started his career working in a bookshop in Shanghai and whose translation work in medicine had earned a position of a professor at Qilu University in 1920. 23 In 1923, Wu's Explication of Reasons in Mohist Dialectics (Mobian jie gu 墨辯解故) was published by the Zhongguo daxue (Wu 1923a). In the years between the years 1922 and 1926 Wu published a series of articles in the Shanghai-based Wissen und Wissenschaft (Xueyi 學藝) journal. part in the debate, albeit not as intensively as others. The debate culminated between the years 1923 and 1924, when Zhang Shizhao (章士釗) and the historian and Confucian scholar Qian Mu (錢穆, courtesy name Binsi 賓四, 1895-1990) also entered the debate.
Though the debate revolved mostly around the authorship and context of the six books in Mohist school, in some respects it was also concerned with the content of the text Gongsun Longzi. Therefore, the participants were also forced to address the question of placement of philosophers like Hui Shi and Gongsun Long, either within or without the Mohist discourse on "proto-logical" questions such as the relationship between language and reality (ming-shi 名實). In this regard, it appears that none have identified the teachings of the members of the School of Names with the late-Mohist school. Luan Diaofu, for example, although he in part agreed with Hu Shi's view on authorship of the six books, emphasized that Gongsun Long was the founder of the School of Names, which had not represented only a branch of neo-Mohist school of philosophy (Luan 1926, p. 23). He further noted that Gongsun Long's theory of "separating hard and white" (li jian bai 離堅白) and "conjoining identity and difference" (he tong yi 合同異) were in complete opposition to the doctrine of Mohism (ibid.). Akin to Liang Qichao, Luan also maintained that, since Gongsun Long lived after Mozi and Yang Zhu he would have received their influence and consequently also endeavour to develop his own answers to the philosophical problems of his predecessors. However, the sheer fact that he did so does not necessarily indicate that he was an adherent of either of their schools of philosophy (ibid.). In his article from 1923, Wu Feibai also expounded on the profound theoretical differences between the Gongsun Longzi and the Mojing, yet in the end he still highlighted the idea that in the Warring States Period the School of Names did not constitute an "independent" or separate school of philosophy but a branch of neo-Mohism (Ibid., p. 63). 24 Commenting on Wu, Zhang Chunyi (張純一, courtesy name Zhongru 仲如, 1871-1955), 25 a senior commentator of Mohist texts and a professor of philosophy at Peking and Yanjing University, made a brief remark that, if Gongsun Long had been a member of Mohist school, it would have been a profoundly heterodox line of Mohism (Ibid., p. 92). Later in the same year, Zhang composed and published three shorter books on Mozi and Mohism, 26 in one of which he developed his own theory of Divisions of Mohism (Mozi fenke 墨學分科), in which Gongsun Long was not mentioned as a member of Mohist school, but rather as a philosopher "who established his own school following the example of Mozi." 27 24 Wu Feibai, "Ping Liang Hu Luan Mobian jiao shi yitong" 評梁胡欒墨辯校釋異同 (Wu 1923b). 25 Zhang was one of those Chinese experts in philosophy and philological studies who in in early 1920s took a great interest in the text of Mozi. In 1922 he published his own commentary on Sun Yirang's Exposing and Correcting the Mozi (Sun 1935

3
From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist… In 1924, the debate started slowly shifting towards a more focused discussion on logic in Mohist dialectics. Thus, following a written correspondence with Hu Shi, in 1924, Zhang Shizhao published an article discussing the Mohist theory of "three things" (san wu lun 三物論) from the perspective of the Aristotelian notion of syllogism. 28 The debate which started in the late 1920s persisted throughout the entire 1930s and was joined by a number of important Chinese philosophers and scholars of ancient Chinese thought, such as Qian Mu, the Buddhologist Yu Yu (虞愚, courtesy name Deyuan 德元, sobriquet Foxin 佛心, 1909-1989), Tan Jiefu (譚戒甫, 1887-1974 and others. Generally speaking, although initially the thought of Gongsun Long did not take the central place in the debate, nonetheless, their indispensable relevance in either comparative of integrative analyses of neo-Mohist logic gradually pushed the "paradoxical thought" of the School of Names to the forefront of the entire discourse on history of logical thought in China. In his article "The Theory of Three Things in Mohist Dialectics" (Mobian sanwulun 墨辯三物論) from 1924, Zhang Shizhao allotted to Gongsun Long only a few lines in the epilogue, describing him as a philosopher not interested in resolving (sheng 勝) but rather in preserving the semantic ambiguities underlying the paradoxes of logic (Zhang Shizhao 1924, p. 24). When two years later Qian Mu published "Mohist Dialectics and Logic" (Mobian yu luoji 墨辯與邏輯), 29 he devoted a great part of his analysis to Gongsun Long's Baimalun. Qian pointed out that, unlike the canonic parts of Mohist dialectics, Gongsun Long did not utilize syllogistic reasoning. Furthermore, in contrast to Zhang Shizhao, he still treated the text as an important offshoot of Mohist discourse on logic (Qian Mu 1928, pp. 6-7), where instead of the method of correct inference the precedence was given to logical paradoxes that arise, inter alia, as a consequence of wrong uses of semantical extension and intension in reasoning (Ibid., p. 7), an endeavor essentially directed towards a rectification of the use of different classes of names (名). On the other hand, Qian, who obviously followed Hu Shi's theory that Gongsun Long and Hui Shi had been members of neo-Mohist school, also recognized that there existed a profound gap between the propensity towards logical consistency in "orthodox" Mohism on one side and Gongsun Long's illogicity on the other. 30 28 A large fraction of their written correspondence was already reproduced in: The Second Volume of Collected Writings of Hu Shi (1936), pp. 259-273. 29 The text was first appeared in 1926, in the Hongyi yuekan 弘毅月刊, and was later (1928) reprinted in the Quishi xueshe shekan 求實學社社刊. 30 In 1925, the publishing office at the National Jinan University published a translation of Takase Takejiro's (高瀨武次郎, 1869-1950) three volume History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexueshi 中國 哲學史, Jap. Shina tetsugakushi 支那哲學史) from 1910. Takase's book further strengthened the position that the so-called School of Names had in fact been promoting a form of sophism, which did not have anything to do with logical reasoning. On the other hand, Takase's view on illogicity of ancient Chinese treatises like Gongsun Longzi was diametrically opposed to Hu Shi's motion for pragmatist essence of Chinese philosophical method, for the former emphasized that these kind of sophisms were essentially unpragmatic and expressed the complete disregard of Chinese "logicians" for natural phenomena (p. 257). Takase went even so far as to assert that, in fact, Chinese philosophy never developed a logical method, but only such sophistic notions of methodology. However, although Takase emphatically rejected the idea that Gongsun Long had been one the founding fathers of a Chinese school of logic, he still spoke in favour of the idea that in the time of Hui Shi and Gongsun Long there existed such a thing as the School of Names.
Maybe one of the reasons for the long lasting divorce between Mohism and Gongsun Long and the gradual rise of interest for the School of Names in early 1930s lay exactly in this kind of discoveries, where "logicality" played the role of the main divisive category. However, albeit in this early discourse on Mohist logic the writings of Gongsun Long were already considered as relatively significant, the relationship started to change in favor of the latter by the late 1920s, when special interest in Gongsun Long was spurred by introduction of alternative or new theoretical contexts, in particular those connected to the highly popular Qinghua school of philosophy (analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, mathematical logic and so on). These developments intensified with the change of atmosphere in national studies in late 1920s, which promulgated a new kind of national construction, in the contest of which the rediscovery of various historical perspectives became one of the main priorities in Chinese intellectual discourse.

Gongsun Long and the polemics on Mingjia 名家 and history of Chinese logic (mingxue 名學), early 1920s-1930s
Concurrently, in cohesion with the debate on Mobian, a second, minor debate started to unfold in the early 1920s. Initially, the debate on Mingjia 名家 and the classification of Chinese logic (mingxue 名學) revolved around Hu Shi's claim that a socalled "School of Names" had never existed as an independent school of philosophy, but that the term Mingjia 名家 was used in later dynasties to denote a branch of the neo-Mohist school of philosophy. Subsequently, a variety of different notions of Chinese logic and classifications of ancient Chinese schools of logic started to emerge, while, concurrently, the debate departed from the initial discourse on Mohism, turning into a separate discourse on "Chinese logic" with its own unique objectives.
As a matter of fact, a formation of a special line of discussion-that is on the notion and classification of mingxue-within the framework of the major debate on Mohism was noticed quite early on. Already in 1923, the Eastern Miscellany Society in Shanghai published a collection of three essays, written by Zhang Shizhao, Hu Shi andChen Qitian (陳啓天, 1893-1984) entitled Mingxue jigu 名學稽古 (Logic-Studies in Ancient Texts) (Dongfang zazhi she ed. 1923). Beside an excerpt from Hu's Outline, which had also been reproduced in the Eastern Miscellany, this short anthology also contained Zhang Shizhao's "Middle Term in Chinese Logic" (Migxue tabian 名學他辨), which discussed the logic of middle terms in Mohist dialectics and in part also in the Gongsun Longzi, 31 as well as Chen Qitian's essay "A Brief Introduction To Ancient Chinese Logic" (Zhongguo gudai mingxue lunlüe 中國古代名學論略) from 1922.
Chen Qitian, who was a member of the Young China Association (Shaonian Zhongguo xuehui 少年中國學會), maintained that in ancient China there had been 31 Zhang took the term tabian 他辨from Gongsun Longzi and interpreted it as the describing a concept close to "middle term" in Western logic. Though, in his Essentials of Logic (Luoji zhiyao 邏輯指要) Zhang used the term zhongci 中詞 etc. Even though the Zhang located the term in Gongsun Long's text, his main concern was with Mohist "logic of middle terms." From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist… no mingxue 名學 as such, but only a school called mingjia 名家 or logicians (Chen 1922, p. 1). On the other hand, Chen pointed out that in the last decades the existence of "Chinese logic" had become a fact, and that the duty of Chinese scholars resided in determining its special characteristics and establish its position within "World logic." Regarding the notion of Chinese logic, Chen believed that it represented one of the three main stems of the so-called "World logic"-the other two were Indian logic (Skt. hetuvidyā, yinming 因明) and Western logic (luoji 邏輯). Apparently, Chen was also one of those intellectuals who succumbed to the influence of pragmatism, for in his brief survey of Western logic Chen named Dewey's "experimental logic" as its highest developmental stage. Moreover, Chen's propensity towards pragmatism was also manifested in the idea of inner division of Chinese logic which was presented in the last section of the article, in which he proposed a division of ancient Chinese mingxue into five major schools: namelessness (wuming xuepai 無名學派) of Laozi 老子, the school of correct names (zhengming xuepai 正名學派) 32 of the early Confucianists, the pragmatist school (shiyong xuepai 實用學派) of Mohism, the school of the doctrine of equality (qilun xuepai 齊論學派), and the sophist school (guibian xuepai 詭 辯學派) of Gongsun Long and Hui Shi. Chen's view on the origin of the "sophists" was that they formed their own school of logic, albeit that at the same time they also borrowed greatly from the neo-Mohists on one side and contemporary Daoists on the other (Chen 1922, pp. 17-18). Chen also believed that, while Confucian and Mohist logic was comparable to Aristotelian logic, the sophist logic of the School of Names was almost identical to ancient Greek sophism (Ibid., p. 18).
In the next few years, between 1923 and 1925, debates on the nature of Chinese developed in numerous Chinese periodicals. One line of the discussion unfolded in the Eastern Miscellany, where in 1923 Zhang Shizhao published the first part of his study on the "Mutual Criticism and Agreement between Mohists and the School of Names" (Ming-Mo ziying 名墨訾應), which aimed at highlighting concrete theoretical differences and agreements between the two schools mentioned in the Zhuangzi. 33 By so doing, Zhang's study additionally emphasized the concept Mingjia 名家 as an independent school of ancient Chinese logic, which entailed an urge to redefine the value of Gongsun Longzi as an independent branch of the learning of names. 34 In 1924, Zhang's textual comparison was revised and amended by Wu Feibai, 35 who disagreed with Zhang's treatment of the Mingjia as an independent 32 In the past discourse on Chinese philosophy, the term zhengming 正名 was interpreted "rectification of names." In contrast, the translation "correct names" implies an originally different approach in Confucian discourse on names and actualities, as well as a fundamentally ethical meaning of the teaching of zhengming. 33 The first article from 1923 bore the title "A Discussion on Mutual Criticism and Agreement Between Mohists and the School of Names" and the second one from 1924 "An Investigation on Mutual Criticism and Agreement Between Mohist and the School of Names". Both were published in the Eastern Miscellany. 34 Later (1934), a typological solution for the question of classification of Gongsun Long was given by Tan Jiefu, who treated his philosophy through the perspective of his theory on "shapes and names" (xingminglun 形名論). 35 Wu's errata of Zhang's analysis were published under the title "Ming-Mo ziying kao bianzheng" 名墨 訾應考辨正 in the Eastern Miscellany. school of thought. One year later Wu also published an article entitled "Who Were Neo-Mohists?" (He wei Biemo? 何謂別墨?), in which he provided a detailed genealogy of the Mohist school, where Gongsun Long and Hui Shi were considered a heterodox branch of the Neo-Mohists school, whose later disciples were known as the School of Names (Mingjia) (Wu Feibai 1925, pp. 11-12).
The written debate on Chinese logic intensified in 1925, when a group of scholars initiated a discussion on logics of various ancient Chinese philosophers. 36 One year later new classifications of Chinese logic started to emerge. Thus, in 1926, Xiong Shijie (熊世傑, ?) published his analysis of ancient Chinese logic from the perspective of modern philosophy. In the article entitled "Factions of Chinese Logic and Their Critique" (Zhongguo mingxue zhi paibie jiqi piping 中國名學之派別及其批 評), Xiong described Mohist logic as a form of logical realism, classifying Gongsun Long into the so-called "mixed school" (zajia 雜家) of logic and describing his teaching as an attempt at theoretical reconciliation (tiaohelun 調和論) between Daoist rationalism and Mohist realism (Xiong 1926, p. 23). Such modern perspectives on mingjia or mingxue became more common towards the late 1920s. Thus, for example, only one year later, He Changqun's (賀昌群, 1903-1973) "School of Names and the So-Called 'Neo-Mohists' in Ancient Chinese History of Philosophy" (Shanggu zhexue shi shang de Mingjia yu suowei "Biemo" 上古哲學史上的名家與 所謂 "別墨") made one step further towards evaluating Gongsun Long through the prism of modern theory of logical paradoxes (He 1927). In comparison with Zhong Tai's (鍾泰, sobriquet Zhongshan 鍾山, 1888-1979) refutation of School of Names as a branch of Mohism from 1926, 37 He's exposition already raised the debate on the philosophy of Gongsun Long from a mere textual comparison with Mohism unto a meta-theoretical comparative plane, based on the standards of Western modern philosophy and logic. 38 36 A wide array of articles on Chinese logic and Gongsun Long were written by authors like, for instance, Wu Xi (吳熙, 1863-1944), Zhang Tingjian (張廷健, ?) etc. In 1925 Wu Jianchan (伍劍禪) a graduate of philosophy at China University in Peking wrote a series of articles criticizing Wu Feibai's views on the "learning on shape and names" (xing-ming xue 形名學)-Wu was also the author of a peculiar lengthy essay "An Outline of Chinese Philosophy in Recent 30 Years" (Sanshi nian lai Zhongguo zhexue gailun 三十年來中國哲學概論) from 1929. 37 At the time, Zhong was a senior professor of Chinese philology at Zhijiang University in Hangzhou. In 1926, he wrote an article entitled "The School of Names Did Not Originate from Mohist Doctrine" (Mingjia bu chuyu Mojing 名家不出於墨經). Three years later (1929), Zhong recapitulated his views on the School of Names in his History of Chinese Philosophy (Vol. 1), which was published with the Commercial Press in Shanghai. 38 In the late 1920s and early 1930s this approach had also manifested itself in Chinese textbooks on Western logic (luoji 邏輯 or lunlixue 論理學). There were two kinds of such textbooks. The first maintained a culture-related notion of logic, providing an overview of similarities between Western logic and Chinese traditional thought. The second kind of textbooks derived from a universal notion of logic and discussed Western logical concepts using examples from both Western textbooks and Chinese philosophy. A few shorter introductions to logic from late 1920s and early 1930s also used the same narrative approach, that, apart from most advanced theories in modern logic (usually Dewey's experimental logic and Russell's mathematical logic), extensively discussed the nature of Chinese and Indian logics. As a noteworthy example thereof, I can mention Zhou Gucheng's (周谷城, 1898-1996) "Introduction to Logic" (Mingxue yinduan 名學引端) from 1928. This kind of textbooks became more common in the mid-1930s as a part of the attempts to reconstruct Chinese traditional identity as a countermeasure against Westernization.

3
From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist… In addition to the trend of modernizing the discourse on Chinese logic and consequently also Gongsun Long as the main preserved example of the School of Names, in the 1930s a strong trend of as it were "tradition-centered" comparative studies on mingjia 名家 and Chinese logic was continued by a number of historians of Chinese philosophy, such as Tan Jiefu and Yu Yu, both of whom proposed their own classifications of Chinese logic.
In the 1930s, Yu Yu's main interest resided in the Indian hetuvidyā and the discursive methods of Buddhist philosophy. Most importantly, Yu regarded both Indian (yinming 因明) and Chinese logics (mingxue 名學) as autonomous branches of the "universal logic" and parallel to Western (ancient Greek) logic (luoji 邏輯) (Yu Yu 1937, p. 3). In that way, in his work Chinese Logic (Zhongguo mingxue 中國名學) from 1937 Yu adopted a similar classification of both "World logic" and Chinese mingxue as Chen Qitian before him. In addition to that, Yu distinguished between four major schools of Chinese logic: school of namelessness (wuming xuepai 無名 學派), school of rectification of names (zhengming xuepai 正名學派), school of establishing names (liming xuepai 立名學派) and school of "shapes and names" (xingming xuepai 形名學派). Each and every of the abovenamed factions was related to a particular school of philosophy: while the first school was connected to Daoist philosophy, the second was related to Confucianism, the third to Mohists and the School of Names. 39 Although Yu's classification seems to imply that the philosophy of Gongsun Long constituted an independent school of logic, his earlier writings on Mohist logic show that Yu was not entirely convinced in the genealogical relation between Gongsun Long and the neo-Mohist school. 40 Thus, although Yu treated Hu Shi's theory as one possible explanation, at the same time he remained open to the idea that Gongsun Long had established his own school of philosophy, which was inherently linked to the zhengming xuepai 正名學派. 41 39 One year earlier, Yu also published an article in which he addressed the question of "Chinese logic." The article "An Introduction to Chinese logic" (Mingxue daoyan 名學導言) was also intended as Yu's contribution to the general debate on Chinese logic, Mohist dialectics and Gongsun Long as outlined in the foregoing sections of this study. 40 In the book Chinese Logic, Yu pointed out that the logic of Gongsun Long and Modi shared the same orientations and topics, however, while he claimed that the Mobian contained a form of deductive logic, he did not claim the same for Gongsun Long. Instead, in Yu's view, Gongsun Long's thought revolved around the paradoxical relations between names and reality, which after all had constituted the theoretical heart of Chinese logic (Yu Yu 1937, pp. 2-4). In the epilogue of his book Yu remarked that while Hui Shi's doctrine on shapes and names could be linked to Daoist ideas or the wuming xuepai, Gongsun Long had been aligned to the zhengming xuepai, to the extent that it his school of logic could be called a major current within the latter. (Ibid., p. 120) 41 See Yu Yu 1935, pp. 387-389. If we want to understand their actual value, Yu's contributions would have to be considered within the broader framework of Buddhist discourse on hetuvidyā (因明) and logic in the 1930s (see Vrhovski 2020). Other scholars of Buddhist logic from the period included the renowned scholar of Buddhist philosophy Jing Changji (景昌極, 1903-1982). In 1930, Jing wrote an essay entitled "Phenomenalism of Master Gongsun Long from the School of Names" (Mingjia Gongsun Longzi zhi weixiang zhuyi 名家公孫龍子之唯象主義), praising Gongsun Long for having embodied a scientific attitude, which surmounted that of the neo-Mohist school. Jing also recognised a philosophical independence of the Mingjia from the Mohist school, and at the same time also admitted that there between them there certainly was a certain degree of theoretic continuity (Jing 1930, pp. 316-318).

Contrary to Yu, Tan maintained a deeper interest in the School of Shapes and
Names (Xing-mingjia 形名家), a generic term coined for distinguishing the School of Names from other schools (家), which were also immersed in discussions of names (名), and as a term of disambiguation for the later School of Names. In the years before he completed his extensive commentary on Gongsun Longzi as the representative work of the School of Names, Tan wrote a detailed analysis of genealogical relations within the abovementioned school, in which he propose a tentative "family-tree" of the school, supported with concrete textual evidence. Hence, in his "On the Divisions of the School of Shapes and Names" (Lun xing-mingjia zhi liubie 論形名家之流別), he portrayed Gongsun Long as a direct descendant of Deng Xi and the sole founding father of the later School of Names (Tan Jiefu 1930, pp. 1-2 (362-363)). 42

Textual rediscovery of Gongsun Longzi, 1920s-late 1930s
In parallel to the above described developments the early 1920s also saw a considerable rise in the reproduction of Qing Dynasty editions and commentaries on Gongsun Longzi. At its early stage this textual rediscovery of Gongsun Longzi was still conducted in the shadow of either a more substantial theoretical rediscovery of Mohist logic or the gradual recognition of the School of Names as a school of Chinese logic. This textual rediscovery further coincided with the considerable rise in the creation of comprehensive commentaries on Mozi (especially the six books of Mobian) in the years between 1920 and 1924. Before 1928, however, there emerged no new comprehensive commentaries or revised editions of Gongsun Longzi, but only reproductions of old editions which were mostly intended as referential material for the ongoing debates on Mohist dialectics. Therefore, in the early 1920s we cannot speak about the rediscovery of Gongsun Longzi as a text but rather about its reemergence prompted by the rediscovery of Mohism in the framework of the discourse on Chinese logic.
Thus, the period 1921 and 1928 was marked by serial reproduction of commentaries by Xie Xishen (謝希深) from Song dynasty and Chen Li (陳澧, 1810-1882) from Qing dynasty. This trend was overturned in 1928, when first independent and complete interpretations of the text emerged. First such example was the first volume of Wang Xiantang's (王獻唐, also known as Wang Guan 王琯, 1896Guan 王琯, -1960 Tentative Explanation of the Gongsun Longzi (Gongsun Longzi xuanjie 公孫龍子 懸解). This was followed by the book Gongsun Longzi shi 公孫龍子釋 (An Explanation of the Gongsun Longzi) compiled by Jin Shoushen (金受申, 1906-1968), a young enthusiast and a student of literature and philosophy at Peking University. As one of the earliest single-standing modern reexaminations of the text, Jin Shoushen's commentary represented a landmark in the development of interpretations of the Gongsun Longzi in the 1920s. Jin essentially regarded the text as the representative 1 3 From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist… work of the School of Names, and hereby objected against the theory of Hu Shi. Moreover, Jin did not focus so much on revising Gongsun Longzi as a text on Chinese logic but more on reinvestigating its main philosophical ideas. In his view, its main goal was to present a correct (straight) view (zhiguan 直觀) of the reality by means of rectification of the relations between names and things, which, according to Jin, had been generally overlooked or intentionally neglected in traditional commentaries (Jin 1928, pp. 1-4). In the very same spirit, throughout his commentaries Jin also endeavored to distill wisdom from the highly logical books of the Gongsun Longzi, such as the Baimalun, while at the same time pointing out their fundamental disaccord with syllogistic logic (Ibid.,. In the following three years, new interpretations of Gongsun Long started to emerge one after another. First, in 1929, the Commercial Press published the book Inquiries into the Gongson Longzi (Gongsun Longzi kao 公孫龍考) by Hu Daojing (胡道靜, 1913Daojing (胡道靜, -2003 a young philologist from Shanghai (Hu 1929). 43 Subsequently, in 1930, Wang Guan's (王琯) Tentative Explanation of the Gongsun Longzi (Gongsun Longzi xuanjie 公孫龍子懸解) was reprinted by the Zhonghua shuju 中 華書局 publishing company. Guan's extensive analysis of the text was aimed at supplementing the preceding debate on Mohist dialectics with a resolution of the question of genealogical relation between Mohist school of philosophy and Gongsun Long. Wang's meticulous dissection of the text was reflective of how the philological interest in Gongsun Longzi in the late 1920s developed out of the urge to provide concrete answers to the foregoing debate on Mohist dialectics and not so much as an autonomous attempt to decipher the modern meaning of the text. Hence, Wang's main objective was to expound to the degree of possible genealogical relatedness or unrelatedness of Gongsun Long to the Mohist school (Wang 1928, Vol. 1, p. 7 (left)). Treatises such as Wang Guan's unequivocally conveyed the fact of the impending separation of Gongsun Long from the discourse on Mohist logic, and the ultimate revival of a discourse on the School of Names as an independent school of philosophy.
In 1931, a similar interpretation was advanced by Qian Mu, who wanted to contribute to the recently arisen trend of modern Chinese commentary on Gongsun Longzi by delivering a thorough analysis of the text through the perspective of Hu Shi's views on Gongsun Long as the representative of late-Mohist sophism. This was followed by Wu Feibai's Detailed Elaboration on the Gongsun Longzi (Gongsun Longzi fawei 公孫龍子發微) from 1932. Three years later, Wu summarized the results of his textological investigations of the text in an article entitled "Correcting the Errors in the Gonsun Longzi" (Gongsun Longzi kanwu 公孫龍子勘誤) published in the Xueshu shijie 學術世界 journal. 44 The year 1934 saw the publication of Tan Jiefu's study Detailed Elaboration on Shapes and Names (Xing-ming fawei 形名發微), which observed Gongsun Longzi's through the perspective of its theory on the relations between shapes (xing 形) and 43 The book was reprinted in 1934 and 1938. 44 A more detailed analysis of Wu Feibai's study of Chinese logic was conducted by Lu Yunrong 盧芸 蓉. See: Lu (2011Lu ( , 2019. 1 3 names (ming 名), pinpointing the main character of the so-called "learning of the school of shapes and names" (xing-mingjia zhi xue 形名家之學) and comparing it with the "learning of the school of names" (mingjia zhi xue 名家之學). By and large, Tan's treatise set down Gongsun Long's position within the School of Names as the main school of ancient Chinese logic.
Another surge of new commentaries occurred around the year 1937, when two more attempts to decode the hidden principles of Gongsun Longzi were made: the first were the Collected Explanations of the Gongsun Longzi (Gongsun Longzi jijie 公孫龍子集解) written by the philologist Chen Zhu (陳柱, 1890-1944 45 and the other was Zhang Huaimin's (張懷民,?) work Collated Interpretation of the Gongsun Longzi (Gongsun Longzi jiaoshi 公孫龍子斠釋). While Chen Zhu attempted to provide a kind of a textological manual in the form a comprehensive overview of previous philological explorations, Zhang Huaimin's interpretation aimed at a modern rediscovery of the philosophical and logical meaning of the text. In particular, Zhang set out to establish a concrete typological link between Chinese logic (mingxue 名學) as found in the Gongsun Longzi and other logics such as ancient Greek logic (luoji 邏輯) and Indian hetuvidyā (yinming 因明). Zhang also attempted to pin down the defining characteristics of Chinese logic at the height of its development. Probably the most important conclusion drawn by Zhang was that the logical method was only one aspect of rectification of names (zhengming 正名) which dominated the philosophical debates in the time of Gongsun Long. Because, apart from logic, Zhang found the philosophical rectification of the relationship between language and reality to have contained profound ethical and utilitarian aspects, he consequently also regarded the mingxue 名學 of Gongsun Long to have been an essentially moral and utilitarian theory of knowledge (Zhang Huaimin 1937, pp. 301-303).

Qian Mu and the later advancement of Hu Shi's "pragmatization" of ancient Chinese logic in early 1930s
Despite of the abovementioned shifts in status of Gongsun Longzi, in the early 1930, the radiating influence of Hu Shi's pragmatist vision of Chinese logical past was still advanced in the circle of more tradition-focused scholars of Chinese philosophy. The representative example of such scholar was Qian Mu, a lecturer in Chinese literary history at Qinghua and Yanjing universities in Peking, who in 1931 published a treatise entitled Hui Shi and Gongsun Long (Huishi Gongsun Long 惠 施公孫龍), in which he argued for Hu Shi's idea that Gongsun Long and Hui Shi were members of the neo-Mohist school of philosophy. In so doing, he delivered a comprehensive textual analysis to support the claim that a sophistic aberration 1 3 From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist… of Mohist logic was essentially pragmatist in origin and theoretically consistent with the ten doctrinal pillars of Mohism. Qian Mu further claimed that the text of Gongsun Longzi revealed the author's strong adherence to Mohist ideals like valuing utilities, practicality (yong 用 "function" and shiyong 實用 "pragmatics"), expediency, universal love etc. With respect to logicity of Gongsun Longzi he reiterated his views from 1926, describing it as an essentially non-logical text. Moreover, Qian also emphasized in the past scholars tended to mistakenly ascribe some parts of the Mozi to Gongsun Long, which is why, in Qian's opinion, at the time there still have not existed any trustworthy comparative analyses of the text, which is what motivated him to compose a comprehensive analysis of its main ideas (Qian Mu 1931, p. 46).

From modern philosophical perspectives to new histories of Chinese logic: modern philosophical reinterpretations of Gongsun Longzi in the early 1930s
The analysis of the relevant material on Chinese logic from the 1920s reveals that modern philosophical currents, such as Russell's New Realism, started to significantly affect the main stream of the discourse only in the second half of 1920s, when China's first major academic center of modern Western philosophy emerged in the form of the Department of Philosophy at the National Qinghua University. The department, which enrolled its first students in the academic year 1926-1927, became a stronghold of New Realism and modern (mathematical) logic. Between late 1920s and early 1930s, the early philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and philosophy of Vienna School were also taught at the department. Whilst the abovementioned currents and theories from modern Western philosophy were gradually introduced to young Chinese intellectuals by the members of the department, concurrently, through writings of the leading members of the department, such as Jin Yuelin (金岳霖, 1895-1984) and Feng Youlan (馮友蘭, 1895-1990, the abovementioned philosophical views also entered the contemporary discourse on Chinese logic and philosophy.
In the earliest historiographical accounts on Chinese philosophy and logic in the 1920s, however, the above-mentioned philosophical views served more as a set of norms used in the evaluation of Chinese philosophical tradition. By the early 1930s, modern Western philosophy became also the chief component in Qinghua philosophers' undertaking to establish a system of modern Chinese philosophy synthesizing traditional concepts and categories with methodologies from the modern West. Thus, when the modern notion of formal logic on one side and the analytic discourse on language and epistemology first entered the ongoing debate on Chinese logic in the late 1920s, it give rise to a new trajectory within the discourse on Chinese traditional logic.
In the earliest period 46 of the existence of the Qinghua department of philosophy, a number of writings by its renowned members already directly or indirectly involved the notion of Chinese logic. Here, we shall not enumerate and discuss all instances of such interpretations in early 1930s, but instead focus exclusively on the thought of Feng Youlan as the representative example of such interpretations of Gongsun Longzi. 47 Feng published his first interpretation of Gongsun Long in the year 1930. The article entitled "The Philosophy of Gongsun Long" (Gongsun Long zhexue 公孫 龍哲學), which appeared in the Qinghua xuebao 清華學報and had been reviewed by Jin Yuelin, Feng set out to explain the Gongsun Longzi by using categories from contemporary analytic philosophy. At the beginning of the article, Feng claimed that the School of Names consisted of two major stains: the first, founded by Hui Shi, attached great importance to particularities and advocated the theory of "conjoining identity and difference" (he tong yi 合同異), whereas the second, led by Gongsun Long, put more emphasis on concepts and advocated the theory of "separating hard and white" (li jian bai 離堅白) (Feng 1930, pp. 1-2). Feng explained all alleged "sophisms" of Gongsun Long as his theory of "universals" (gongxiang 共相) and "elements" (yaosu 要素), juxtaposition of denotation and connotation of names (ming 名) and the existence versus subsistence of objects referred to by language. 48 Thus, for instance, in Feng's opinion, in Baimalun a distinction was drawn between "universals" and "elements" (yaosu 要素), horse and colour, respectively. When it came to the Baimalun, Feng further maintained that it represented Gongsun Long's attempt to devise a theory of reference, in which the names (ming 名) denoted primarily universals. He showed how the theory of universals was further developed in the Treatise on Hard and White (Jianbailun 堅白論), where the visual and tangible qualities of objects, such as colour and hardness, were all regarded as universals (ibid., p. 3). Regarding Gongsun Long's proposition that whiteness and hardness do not have an independent existence, Feng Youlan remarked that Gongsun Long was discovering a distinction between existence and subsistence like that in New Realism (Ibid.,p. 5), pointing out that in his other treatises Gongsun Long had developed a rudimentary theory of reference, where denotation was strictly differentiated from connotation, and individual entities and concepts were defined in a manner similar to Plato. Most importantly, in the concluding parts of his analysis Feng pointed out that Gongsun Long's aimed to show how a rational investigation of the world differs from the world of constructed from the sense data (Ibid.). 49 Feng's interpretation of Gongsun Long and Hui Shi was further elaborated on in the first volume of his History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexueshi 中國 哲學史), published originally with the Commercial Press in 1934. 50 A condensed version of the interpretation was given already in his A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue xiaoshi 中國哲學小史) from 1933.
In the 1930s, however, the interpretations of Gongsun Longzi were not only influenced by the notion of modern logic associated with analytic philosophy. With the growing popularity of scientific worldviews, such as Marxism and so on, the 1930s saw a considerable rise in criticisms against conservative or metaphysical interpretations of Chinese philosophy, including the pragmatism. Starting already in the late 1920s, before the Soviet doctrine of dialectical materialism was extensively introduced to China, the proponents of dialectical materialism like Ye Qing (葉青, real name Ren Zhuoxuan 任卓宣, 1896-1990), Guo Zhanbo (郭湛波, original name Guo Haiqing 郭海清, 1900-1989 or the brothers Zhang Shenfu and Zhang Dainian (張岱年, courtesy name Jitong 季同, 1909-2004), 51 were still in pursuit of dialectical thought in Chinese traditional philosophy, trying to draw parallels between Chinese and Marxist or Hegelian dialectics. To prove their points, they also had to produce new commentaries on the representative works of ancient Chinese philosophy. Naturally, a significant number of these commentaries were also concerned with the problematics related to traditional Chinese (formal) logic and dialectical logic from Marxist classics. 52 In addition to that, in the early 1930s, Chinese adherents of 49 Cf. : Zhao Yanfeng (2013, pp. 31-36). 50 The chapter bore the title "Hui Shi, Gongsun Long and Other Dialecticians" (Feng 1934, pp. 139-177). 51 Even though the Zhang brothers were amongst the most ardent and prolific propagators of analytic philosophy in the 1930s China, at the same time, they both had a strong proclivity towards traditional philosophy (Confucian ethics and traditional cosmologies) on one hand and dialectical materialism on the other. Thus, apart from other peculiar ways of creating a synthesis between tradition and modernity, Chinese philosophy and Western science, they both also proposed a form of objectivism, where subjectivity would be merged with objectivity to produce a universal image of the universe and human being, and where the methodological foundations would be provided in form of a method which would consist of mathematical logic on one hand and dialectical method on the other, or, in a more general sense, a synthesis between the analytical method and dialectical materialism. See, for example : Zhang Shenfu (1934) and Zhang Dainian (1935, p. 238). 52 From Engels' Dialectics of Nature to Lenin and Plekhanov. dialectical materialism set out to address the question of logic in the context of the ongoing public polemics about formal and dialectical logic (bianzheng luoji 辯證邏 輯 also referred to as "dialectical method," bianzhengfa 辯證法).
In 1934, Ye Qing published a Critique of Hu Shi (Hu Shi piping 胡適批評), which also touched upon Hu's interpretation of the historical roots of Chinese logic. The criticism reveals Ye's high esteem for the thought Gongsun Long and Hui Shi, which caused him to emphatically reject Hu's Mohism-centred idea of Chinese logic. In contrast to Hu, Ye believed that the actual origin of Chinese logic was the thought of Gongsun Long and his contemporaries. He supported his claims in a manner which was completely in line with Marxist doctrine on intellectual evolution of humanity: he indicated that, in the time of Gongsun Long, Chinese philosophers recognised the significance of logic through their encounters with dialectical reasoning, which also inspired them to derive a logical method out of the teachings of Mozi (Ye Qing 1933/4, p. 247). For the same reason Ye also strongly disagreed with Hu's claim that logic had developed in all schools of ancient Chinese philosophy. Moreover, Ye also asserted that, though its close contact with the Mohist "scientific method", the School of Names became equipped with principles of materialist thought. And because in China logic was invented in the so-called age of "dialectics" (bianzheng 辯證), Gongsun Long was able to make considerable advances in "pure philosophy" and in addition develop a sound version of dialectical method (bianzhengfa 辯證法) (Ibid., pp. 247-8). Finally, Ye thought that Gongsun Long's epistemology and logic (lunlixue 論理學) contained dialectical method, furthered personal experience as the standard of truth and incorporated materialism, which also made his thought China's earliest form of "dialectical materialism" and a "revolutionary philosophy which sparked a revolution in philosophy". (Ibid.,p. 255) A similar connection between dialectical logic and Chinese logic (bianxue 辯 學) was also proposed by Guo Zhanbo, the unofficial Marxist historiographer of the period. Apart from a series of articles in which Guo compared materialist dialectics with methodological foundations of various other philosophical systems, in 1932, he published a specialised study entitled A History of Chinese Logic in the Pre-Qin Period (Xian-Qin bianxueshi 先秦辯學史). In a typically historiographical manner Ye presented a profoundly Marxist critique of the recent developments in studies of history of "Chinese logic" (辯學), in particular the work of Hu Shi, Wu Feibai and others (Guo Zhanbo 1932, pp. 203-205). While, like Ye Qing, Guo treated Gongsun Long as the key figure of an independent School of Names, he further believed that, because of "dialecticians" like him, the age he lived in could be called the "age of logic". In this sense, Guo portrayed the logic of the Gongsun Longzi as a far more advanced than his predecessors (Ibid., p. 187). Hence, he not only strongly disagreed with Hu Shi's "pragmatization," but also posited that as the ultimate pinnacle of ancient Chinese logic, the Gongsun Longzi essentially contained elements similar to dialectical logic (Ibid., p. 186). Later, in his most widely known work Chinese Intellectual History in the Last Fifty Years (1936), Guo's vision of modern Chinese intellectual history was completely permeated with the idea that, following formal, experimental and mathematical logic, dialectical logic represented the most advanced method available in China. He also summarised the debates on Chinese logic in the recent decade, emphasizing that "ancient Chinese logic" (Zhongguo gudai lunlixue中國古代論理學) represented the fourth major "method of thought" that existed in China at the time. 53 (Guo Zhanbo 1965, pp. 243-245, 265-269, 276) As the above examples reveal, in the 1930s, as new methodological bases were introduced into the general discourse on Chinese logic, the discourse on Gongsun Longzi also shifted from discovery of tradition to modernization of tradition. On the other hand, the former discourse acquired an appearance of a conservative, philological debate, lacking the potential to recontextualize ancient Chinese philosophy into a modern philosophical discourse. 54 At the same time, the direction of the earlier mainstream debates on Chinese logic critically departed from the objective to attain modernity and started to incorporate a classification of logic based on a universal yet still culture-related notion of logic. 55 Furthermore, the so to say "traditional" character of the early discourse on Chinese logic was also pointed out by adherents of Marxism, probably with the intention to justify the precedence of Marxist view of Chinese tradition over those advanced by senior philosophers and philologists. In this sense, in the 1930s, the discourse on Gongsun Long also represented one of the platforms where the philological approach was contended by alternative approaches to modernization of Chinese thought, where precedence was given to advanced philosophies and scientific methodology from the West, and consequently also the battleground of prevalent ideologies. 53 Interestingly, a similar view on Chinese logic was also given in the educationalist Lin Zhongda's (林 仲達) book Comprehensive Logic (Zonghe luoji 綜合邏輯) (1936), which argued for a complete unification of all known sciences of logic, from mathematical logic, to dialectical logic, and down to traditional logics such as Chinese mingxue 名學. The idea of such logical synthesis was developed in the ideological framework of Chen Lifu's (陳立夫) theory of Vitalism, the official "scientific/philosophical" worldview of the Kuomintang. In his work, Lin treated mingxue as a manifestation of universal logic, having divided the "Chinese native logic" (guyou mingxue固有名學) into three branches: the axiological school (jiazhilun 價值論) of Confucianism and Legalism, utilitarian school (gongli zhuyi 功利主義) of Mozi, and the dialectical school (bianzhenglun 辯證論) of Daoistis and the School of Names. (Lin 1936, pp. 53-58) 54 Kurtz (2011, pp. 360-365) speaks about de-modernization of Chinese logic only in the context of post-1949 interpretations of Chinese logic, which were conducted in the framework of the so-called "Maoist paradigm". On interpretational directions and approaches in pre-and post-1949 China see : Cui Qingtian (2005). 55 A representative of this trend was also Zhang Dongsun (張東蓀), who towards the end of the 1930s advocated a culture-related idea of logic. E.g. "Different Types of Logic and Culture-Discussed Together with Chinese Neo-Confucianism" (Butong de luoji yu wenhua bing lun Zhongguo lixue 不同 的邏輯與文化並論中國理學) from 1939. However, this theory seems to have been founded on Zhang's misunderstanding of Jin Yuelin's article "Alternative Systems of Logic" from 1934, which, as the title suggests, elaborates on idea that there exist different formal systems of the science of logic, while there is only one logic as such. In 1941, Jin addressed Zhang's misinterpretation of his article from 1934 in an essay entitled "On Different Types of Logic" (Lun butong de luoji 論不同的邏輯), which was published at the beginning of 1941.

Conclusion
Although the above study has barely scratched the surface of the extremely extensive material from the Republican era, which bore any relations to the discourse on either the text Gongsun Longzi, the philosophy of Gongsun Long, the question of the School of Names, or the notion of Chinese logic (名學, 辯學 etc.), after a brief examination of the material I can draw the following tentative conclusions: (I) The main currents of interpretation of the Gongsun Longzi in 1920s and 1930s developed in deep confluence with the proliferation of ideas from most influential Western philosophies in China at the time. At the same time, the aspects of the Western philosophies that exerted the greatest influence on the development of the debate on the "logicity" of Gongsun Longzi, were usually related to the notion of logic inherent in these philosophies. (II) In early 1920s, Hu Shi's history of ancient Chinese logic and philosophy encapsulated a strong theoretical propensity towards pragmatism and its notion of experimental logic. Later, before the end of the 1920s, other philosophical worldviews took ground within the discourse on Chinese logic and Gongsun Long as a member of the School of Names. Thus, for instance, with the development of a strong analytic current in Chinese philosophy (Qinghua University), perspectives from New Realism, Vienna School of philosophy and modern formal logic started to enter the discourse. In the early 1930s, first "Marxist" attempts to reshape the discourse appeared. (III) Concurrently, due to their strong dependence on philological means of argumentation, which rested exclusively on the past Chinese commentarial tradition, the debates on Mohist dialectics and Chinese logic in the early 1920s not only initiated a new wave of textual commentary and rediscovery of the texts under question, but indirectly also highlighted the value of traditional philological approaches as a means of revitalizing the tradition and its integration into a version of Chinese modernity, where the culture of the East would meet the science and technology of the West in a harmonic marriage. Moreover, those discussants who adhered to the main line in philological debates in the late 1920s, and who in their analysis of Chinese logic applied modern theoretical instruments, were more likely to espouse a view on universal logic, where pragmatist or experimental logic occupied the highest place on the pedestal of Western modern logic.
Among the elements derived from the "traditional" commentary, which continued to exist in the so-called philological line of the debate in the 1930s, was also the perspective that the logic of Gongsun Longzi-as well as Chinese logic in general, had been inherently related to the traditional concept of zhengming 正 名.
(IV) Consequently, regardless of the theoretical foundations of the current of interpretation, the discourse on Chinese logic also caused a rise in textual reproduction of Gongsun Longzi and new comprehensive commentary on the text.