School of Names also called, in Chinese, ming chia, a loosely associated group of Chinese philosophers of the Warring States period (403– 221 B.C.), also known as pien che (Dialecticians or Sophists). The most famous were Hui Shih and Kung-sun Lung Tzu. Though interested in the relation between names and reality, the Sophists addressed such issues as relativity, perspectivism, space, time, causality, essentialism, universalism, and particularism. Perhaps more important than their subject matter, however, was their methodology. As their name suggests, the Sophists delighted in language games and logical puzzles. They used logic and rational argument not only as a weapon to defeat their philosophical opponents but as a tool to sharpen rational argumentation itself. Paradoxes such as ‘I go to Yüeh today but arrive yesterday’ and ‘A white horse is not a horse’ continue to stimulate philosophical discussion today. Yet frustrated Confucian, Taoist, and Legalist contemporaries chided Sophists for wasting their time on abstractions and puzzles, and for succumbing to intellectualism for its own sake. As Confucianism emerged to become the state ideology, the School of Names disappeared sometime in the early Han dynasty (206 B.C. – A.D. 220); having been in important measure co-opted by the leading interpreter of Confucianism of the period, Hsün Tzu. See also CHINESE PHILOSOPHY , HSÜN TZU , KUNG -SUN LUNG TZ. R.P.P. & R.T.A.