The Sorites Paradox has a very long history, though one less rich than that of its close relative, the Liar. This chapter is divided into three sections. Section 1 presents a very brief and schematic overview of the pre-analytic history of the Sorites Paradox, from the Ancient Greeks to Kant and Hegel. Section 2 focuses on Chrysippus (Stoic from the third century BC), the ancient philosopher who worked most on the Sorites. Chrysippus held an epistemic view of vagueness and proposed a strategy to respond to the paradox in the context of a dialectical questioning (similar to what is now commonly called the Forced March) that deserves to be thoroughly examined. Section 3 focuses on Leibniz, who produced, in the author's view, the most interesting contribution in modern pre-analytic times on the paradox. Leibniz started by accepting that vague notions have sharp boundaries, but then changed his mind and moved to something like a semantic view of vagueness.

Contextualist accounts of the Sorites Paradox are sometimes taken as claiming that vagueness just is (a form of) context-sensitivity, and that the paradox is solvable by appeal to that context-sensitivity alone.We argue that this interpretation is misleading.Certainly contextualist accounts often provide plausible diagnoses of the intuitive pull of the soritical premise, and, due to their dynamical nature, they are well-suited to explain linguistic behaviour in so-called forced-march versions of the puzzle.However, they usually have to be coupled with non-contextualist accounts in order to resolve the paradox proper.We begin by distinguishing various contextualist explanations of the appeal of the soritical premise.Then we point out three main virtues of these approaches and discusssome objections.Lastly we consider the prospects for a recent descendant of contextualism that is meant to solve the paradox proper as well as the forced march puzzle.