The Dialectical Chapters of the Mohist Corpus, written around 300 BCE, are a unique document of ancient Chinese thinking about language and natural phenomena. Their different parts have variously been compared to core assets from the history of Western science such as Aristotelian logic and Archimedean mechanics. At the same time, the Mohist texts developed independently from these Western traditions and furthermore suffered a wholly different fate. For this reason they constitute an excellent object of study in the long-term development of knowledge, making it possible to address questions concerning the conditions and contingencies of the development of theoretical knowledge traditions.
