33 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Chai (ed.), Dao Companion to Xuanxue 玄學 (Neo-Daoism), Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49228-1_3 Chapter 3 The Metaphysical Style and Structural Coherence of Names in Xuanxue Jana S. Rošker 1 Introduction In their disputes on names (concepts) and actualities (mingshi 名實), the classical scholars of the pre-Qin and Han era still viewed reality as being composed of tan- gible external objects and their objective forms. In the Xuanxue 玄學 discourses of the Wei-Jin period, however, we encounter a different, deeper, and much more com- plex, theoretically elaborated understanding of reality. For most leading scholars of this period, reality was no longer reduced to the existence of objective things and their external forms but was understood as something that simultaneously includes our perception and understanding of these objects and their forms respectively. Based on such an onto-epistemological agenda, their investigations were focused upon the inherent constitution of meaning. In this context, meaning was no longer something directly and one-dimensionally connected with things or something, forming a part of them. The present chapter aims to illustrate this process, which has led the prevailing currents of traditional Chinese theory of perception from a realist assessment of reality to a more complex philosophy of human understanding. This development, which began with an essential upgrading of the mingshi debate into a discourse on the relation between language (yan 言) and meaning (yi 意), will be illuminated through the lens of three crucial concepts that have been fundamentally modifed in Wei-Jin epistemological thought, and which manifest J. S. Rošker (*) Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia e-mail: Jana.Rosker@ff.uni-lj.si