ABSTRACT
The members of the ming jia (mingjia), or “school of names”—like the ancient Greek sophists after whom they are sometimes called (they are also, variously, called dialecticians, nominalists, and logicians)—were not an actual school of thinkers bound by a common philosophy or having a common founder. Rather, they were individual thinkers who have been retrospectively identified as a school by virtue of a perceived common eristic approach to disputation or discrimination (bian).
