ABSTRACT
The starting-point of my investigation is the discovery of the following, highly paradoxical situation: although metaphors are theoretically banned from philosophical discourse in ancient Greece, Plato, the Presocratics, and even Aristotle rely very heavily on metaphorical expressions, whereas in ancient China, where the metaphorical way of arguing is not condemned, but rather encouraged, metaphors are only sparingly used and we hardly find any reflections or theories focusing on them. There are, in ancient China, many anecdotes, parables, allegories, metaphors and analogies, but the specific technique of using systematically one, better known domain, to conceptually recategorize another, at first sight totally different, but more obscure domain, is not recognized as a specific philosophical problem. In the Greek philosophical tradition, on the other hand, there is a great discrepancy between the theoretical attitude to metaphor and the way in which metaphors are actually used, because the philosophers do not comply with rules established by themselves.
