22 replies on “Episode 14 of “This Is the Way”: Women in the Analects”

1. Erin’s translation has been published! https://www.wiley.com/en-au/shop/general-philosophy/the-analects-a-contemporary-translation-p-9781324097747

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2. I have strong misgivings regarding the use of Prof Cline’s works as valid points of access to understand the role of women in the Analects. There are some serious misunderstandings in both her 2022 and 2026 books, some of which I discussed in my book review, published on August 28, 2026 in the Foreign Policy (Gift link here https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/08/28/china-confucius-analects-cline/?utm_content=gifting&tpcc=gifting_article&gifting_article=Y2hpbmEtY29uZnVjaXVzLWFuYWxlY3RzLWNsaW5l&pid=PNI6oXabXq1ydw6&fbclid=IwY2xjawUC-TpwZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5G-ciYcKO6AyGxZiaZ8K4W1v2co2HtMp9Hjm_FkhQ0Fwq77d9S-tjtZ3Y-NQ_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw)

   It’s is unclear what primary sources Prof Cline relied on in her work, if any. Footnotes will cite e.g., “Lienuzhuan (sic) 7.11” (footnote 9 page 238 of her 2022 book), but there are no edition of the 列女傳 in the bibliography. This happens throughout the book.

   At the very least, this episode should be counterbalanced by a second episodes hosting experts in ancient Chinese texts, who can give listeners an expert assessment of ancient Chinese texts and their depiction of women.

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   • As Justin once told me to my face, we’re just boring historians.

3. Hi Maddalena,

   Thanks for sharing this review, which I thought was really well done. I learned much from it and your criticisms seemed fair. Indeed, we are happy to have historians and sinologists on the podcast (just had Mark Csikszentmihalyi on) and we hope to also have on Esther Klein in the not too distant future. I will certainly be reading more of your work too and I hope you will join us at some point.

   I’m definitely in the camp (and so is Justin I believe) that the work of sinologists and historians are very important, even though I’m a philosopher and spend more time thinking about particular lines of argument and philosophical concepts. We may be focusing on different questions and have different tasks, but I think all of it matters, and the disciplinary silos we sometimes construct don’t do us any good.

   And I certainly have enjoyed and learned much from reading your works Paul! I hope that you are doing well since I last saw you—I very much enjoyed your talk.

   Cheers,
   Richard

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   • Thanks for the shout-out, Richard! Happy to be on the pod. Though I’ve been trying hard to combine the roles of “boring historian” and “happy-go-lucky philosopher”. Probably it leaves me neither fish nor fowl, but always happy to blab on about something, hehehe.

4. I want to make a brief follow-up: on rereading the book review, I think some of the substantive questions raised are significant, but I also think the essay is too one-sided and overly harsh in its presentation.

   I think that just as sinologists and historians can do valuable work without doing the same work as philosophers, philosophers can also do valuable work without doing the same work as sinologists and historians (nobody can do everything). We can always find objections and raise criticisms from our own trained specialty because, well, we were trained to be specialists in that way—but I think it is good to also try to appreciate what different scholars are doing. I wish if the review did more to highlight the contributions of Erin’s book such as the way it organizes the book around core themes which can help guide new readers, and the way it raises important questions about gender. I think we can all be more charitable and generous as scholars.

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   • After 30+ years of (vainly) hoping for better relations, both personal and intellectual, between philosophers and intellectual historians, here’s my impression of what’s going on: the issues that Maddalena highlighted in her review are perceived very differently by the two groups. To intellectual historians, getting this stuff wrong (or worse, making no effort to get it right) is so serious as to be disqualifying; to philosophers, it’s more like “Ho-hum, Cline got this or that detail wrong–historians, as usual, are missing the point. They should learn to be more charitable and appreciate all the great things that philosophers are doing.”

     Also … be careful about wielding the word “charitable” like a cudgel. If charitable reading serves to perpetuate the basic misconceptions that Maddalena pointed out, then there’s something very wrong with charitable reading.

   • @Paul
     I’m curious if you see this dynamic as specific to certain subfields (e.g., Chinese philosophy) or if you see this tension between intellectual historians and philosophers as a general problem? (Or perhaps it is a matter of degree how much philological sloppiness is tolerated in a given humanities subfield?)

     (NB: I ask because I’d like to imagine that, say, Plato scholars in philosophy view awareness of relevant textual cruxes as part of the basic “homework” of the field. With that ideal in mind, I see this sort of friction as healthy, as pushing for higher standards is how we can advance. Having someone respect me enough to ruthlessly hold me to higher standards improved my work, such as it is and such as it remains.)

5. All this said, the deeper question of historical distance has still not been addressed. There is a desire in North America (and Europe) to understand Confucian texts within the horizon of the present, and hence also to rid the tradition of, or at least to attenuate, certain misogynistic convictions that were undoubtedly part of it. But to what extent is this desire legitimate at all? Historians can raise objections here, but from a philosophical perspective as well, some aspects of this approach appear questionable, or at least naïve. Strictly speaking, Confucius cannot speak to us in the same way that a human being of the twenty-first century can. Hermeneutic philosophers such as Gadamer and Ricoeur, but also analytic philosophers such as Putnam, were well aware of the problem of historical distance and relativity. Unfortunately, many areas of philosophy today are dominated by a strongly presentist perspective. The past is expected to sound as though it were the present. Yet the past is a foreign country—and this is most probably as true in China, Taiwan, and Japan as it is in the West.

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   • @ Kai

     Even given philologically perfectly executed research, this question remains. My sense is the whole reception history is a series of creative reappropriations, as some ideas are “live” and others “dead” in any given context. The traditional reappropriations within the culture are what interests me, and I suspect with enough historical distance the reappropriations of today will seem just as “creative” as those in the traditional, premodern commentaries. This of course is not a neutral position: I agree “presentism” is naive, and I believe current philosophical reconstructions will appear as naive as the traditional, premodern commentaries in due course, only it remains an open question whether the contemporary works will withstand the test of time in a similar way.

     (For example: When reading Wang Pang 王雱 (1044–1076) on Zhuangzi, who endures and is read and studied in the sinophone world even today, one might nonetheless reasonably cringe when he imposes Neo-Confucian vocabulary on the work. But for him that was the current and correct vocabulary for penetrating the work. Efforts to read contemporary anglophone philosophy into these works will in the end likely read similarly to future readers, though for their own, no less contingent, reasons. Whether these contemporary works will likewise endure is for the “test of time” to decide, but the traditional, premodern commentaries live on as a culturally specific art form in its own right.)

6. Hi Paul,

   I think we can all be more charitable and generous as scholars, even while critiquing and raising objections to one another. There are different ways of making criticisms, and I think it is worth trying to do so respectfully and with generosity toward the person whose work we are discussing.

   Best,
   Richard

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   • @ Richard

     I’m aware of three senses of “charity” that might be disambiguated, as I think people might be speaking past one another: (i) as a guiding principle of informal logic, where to violate the principle is to commit a straw man fallacy (i.e., the sort of thing taught in a critical thinking course); (ii) as hermeneutic principle, viz. a hermeneutics of suspicion (focus on what caused someone to maintain such-and-such) vs. hermeneutics of charity (for what reasons compelled someone maintain such-and-such); and (iii) as a basic enabling condition for and constraint on communication, where to violate the principle is to fail to communicate (e.g., if we’re not discussing a more or less similar world, then communication becomes more or less impossible; i.e., the sort of thing taught in a seminar on Davidson or the like). It seems to be used here in none of these technical senses, but instead as (iv.1) demanding a certain sort of decorum (something like scholarly etiquette or institutional civility). Whether the review violated decorum is one thing, but whether the review was substantive is another. But the substantive points were already conceded, so this isn’t particularly interesting.

     HOWEVER, there is a separate, and I think potentially stronger criticism of the review which you suggested earlier but don’t mention here, which is that the review harps on the shortcomings while ignoring the book’s positive contributions. This might be termed (iv.2) “balanced criticism” or “epistemic proportionality” rather than charity (which already has too many distinct senses), and this can be understood in a few truth-relevant senses: Do the mistakes undermine the book’s main arguments? Does the book nonetheless make a contribution worth preserving? Perhaps the reviewer doesn’t believe the work makes any positive contributions? That is her right. Or perhaps any positive contributions are rendered irrelevant by the shortcomings. That seems to be the move in calling the errors “discrediting”. There is a certain danger in this move, as everyone makes mistakes, sometimes howlers, and throwing stones from a glass house is a dangerous game. (In any event, I’d hate to be dismissed prematurely for my worst mistakes that survived in print. Academia is a weird place.)

     A sympathetic defender of Cline might see this objection as a jump from a local criticism to a global critique: so-and-so made a mistake here, thus the whole is suspect. The test for this is if the work can assimilate the criticisms and otherwise remain intact. I suspect this is the interesting rupture point.

7. @JR Williams

   I don’t consider myself sufficiently well versed in Greek (or indeed any other branch of) philosophy to answer your question with confidence. My guess is that the problem you’re calling philological sloppiness is particularly acute in Chinese philosophy, but that’s not based on anything like systematic investigation.

   As for appealing to “charity”: I have to say, that move immediately turns me off. As an outsider, I hear philosophers preaching the ideal of charitable reading to people in OTHER disciplines, but failing to practice it themselves. I’ll leave it at that. On a more methodological level: at a workshop at Penn just before the pandemic, I gave a paper called “Beyond the Principle of Charity, Or, Why Historians Are Troubled by Donald Davidson.” Maybe I should write it up, because I do think I’ve put my finger on a profound and perhaps insurmountable difference between the two fields. Few historians have devoted any time to reading Davidson (the lack of engagement goes both ways), and if they did, they’d be disturbed. Historians are perhaps too acutely aware that cynical argumentation has, time and again, century after century, served to justify hatred and abuse. So we don’t worry so much about reading charitably.

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   • That’s a very good point Paul about how philosophers far too often act hypocritically. And indeed, I’ve personally witnessed philosophers acting very uncharitably and arrogantly to those outside of the field. We certainly need to practice this better ourselves, myself included.

   • @Paul

     As for the principle of charity, note that it is a more slippery expression than what one finds in Davidson, and for Davidson himself it is something he was continually refining, shifting from “maximal” to “optimal” agreement, and giving “explicable error” a larger role than is sometimes appreciated. I agree “charity” is often (but not always, and probably not in this case) a conversation stopper (if not a cudgel), but for different reasons: it is often unclear what is being demanded, owing to different uses in different contexts.

     Concerning Chinese and Greek philosophy as covered in anglophone philosophy departments, my sense is perhaps similar. For instance, these days, one wouldn’t expect someone to claim philology is “just/all/mostly interpretation” or to speak in terms of having special insight in “Greek ways of thinking” or “Greek cultural narratives” or “the Greek mind.” My understanding is that that was all set aside long ago. But sometimes one still finds analogues in Chinese philosophy as done in anglophone philosophy departments. (But it is my impression that that sort of thing is becoming less prevalent.)

     I think a better understanding of the reception of and main cruxes in the works is desirable in many cases, almost certainly including my own. (And indeed, so much remains controversial in the works, that I wonder if working from translations is always safe in the same way as working from English renderings of many Greek, Latin, or German classics, where philological matters are well understood and settled to a remarkable degree. Thus, philosophical interpretation has a comparatively settled footing with such works. It would appear that basic construal questions just aren’t as settled with many early Chinese sources, or at least there are many cruxes that pull one in different directions.)

   • Maybe one solution is for philosophers and sinologists/historians to pursue more collaborate projects together. Remembering that all the Chinese classics were also collaborative projects might help to encourage this.

     Even if the philological issues with Greek texts are more settled, the English-language scholarship I remember reading when I last studied Greek philosophy as an undergrad ignored any pre-20th century commentators, as well as any non-English language work besides the original texts. When I started studying Chinese philosophy, it was refreshing that many scholars attended to Chinese (and sometimes Japanese) scholarship as well as historical commentaries.

     However, I haven’t read much scholarship on Greek philosophy since my undergrad, so I may have gotten a limited view of the field or things may have changed by now. And of course this is not true for all scholars of Chinese philosophy, and most of us could do more to engage with historical commentaries and especially non-English-language research. I have generally assumed that those who do not do this were trained in the same norms that govern Anglophone scholarship on Greek thought that doesn’t require engagement with the commentarial tradition. I’d be happy to know if these thoughts are completely off-base though.

   • @ Henry

     The commentaries remain necessary in reading Chinese classics because, beyond fixing corrupted passages, understanding the derived meanings of words is essential for a precise translation.

     None of our current dictionaries track derived meanings in sufficient detail. The more detailed ones just list some possible meanings without any robust sense of derivation or the appropriate context for a given derivation. The commentaries provide insight into these meanings. (Translators like Watson leaned heavily on the Japanese tradition, where Japanese scholars had already put in the painstaking work of tracking derived meanings.) If one were to translate in terms merely of basic meanings the translations would be vague. (And the somewhat exoticizing trope that Chinese invites multiple readings is often less a feature of the language than a reflection of the state of the field.) If one is translating simply from a list of possible meanings and sorting based on what seems to make sense, then we are in trouble. Ideally, the derived meanings will eventually be sorted well enough to focus directly on the texts, but the scholarship is not at that stage for many of the classic works. The reasons for this seem largely practical: the reward structures of academia are at odds with this sort of grueling work.

   • (NB: I mentioned earlier that speaking in terms of “Greek ways of thinking” and the like has largely been set aside. I think I should mention, in fairness to Heidegger and Nietzsche and others who tended to generalize in such ways, that what they were doing is still quite different from those who speak in terms of “Chinese ways of thinking”: they generalized from the philology, whereas the latter tend to do philology in terms of such generalizations. This is a key difference, especially given (as I’ve insisted) that the philology is not yet settled and standardized in a way that permits the same degree of confidence in our current translations.)

   • (But then again, philologists tend to accuse Heidegger and Nietzsche of likewise reversing the order and projecting generalizations back onto the texts, so perhaps that note is no good.)

8. Hi JR,

   Those are good distinctions. I think I was speaking more about civility and kindness, which was in my head connected to the interesting idea you raised about ‘balanced criticism’ or ‘epistemic proportionality’. Your comment was quite clear and helpful, thank you.

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9. @JR Williams.

   “If one were to translate in terms merely of basic meanings the translations would be vague. (And the somewhat exoticizing trope that Chinese invites multiple readings is often less a feature of the language than a reflection of the state of the field.).”

   Because of its flexible grammar, Classical Chinese does tend to permit multiple interpretations. In fact, clever literati often wrote in such a way as to invite multiple interpretations. While I agree with your general point that scholarship (at least in the West) lags behind its counterparts in Greco-Roman history and philosophy, there’s still an inescapable level of indeterminacy in any Classical Chinese text, which we ought to embrace. Moreover, it’s important to distinguish between primary commentaries (e.g., the Wang Bi commentary on Laozi), which were not only commentaries but fixed the very text, precisely because it was severely underdetermined (I discuss this in the introduction to The Art of Chinese Philosophy), and the later phonetic and semantic glosses that you’re talking about. The latter can be very insightful, because the people who produced them tended to be extraordinarily well read, so it would be self-defeating to ignore them. But they’re not always persuasive and their basis is often mere intuition.

   One thing to keep in mind: what philosophers like to call “Sinology” (typically with a soupçon of disdain) is very difficult; it was difficult even for pre-modern literati who would commence a rigorous program of education around the age of four. I embrace that too. Some people consider it tedious though. 不憤不啟.

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   • @Paul R. Goldin

     Thanks for the reply. I agree that the baseline degree of indeterminacy is high. I have in mind claims like this when I emphasize the importance of such commentary:

     “It [i.e., yóu 遊] occurs not only in the title of the first chapter but altogether ninety-five times in the whole text and, if one also adds the ten occurrences of the practically synonymous character you 游, written with the “water” radical, even more than one hundred times. There are only very few philosophically significant terms that are used with such frequency in this core Daoist text” (Moeller, Hans-Georg, in Roger T. Ames and Takahiro Nakajima, eds., 2015. Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish, p. 248).

     This passage treats a zì 字 (graph) count as if it were a cí 詞 (lexeme/word) count, and goes on to treat multiple cí as one word on the basis of the conflation.[i] Sinophone scholars have taken great pains to avoid this sort of semantic flattening out. A high-frequency zì, of course, does not imply a high-frequency cí. Syntactic position and context determine the cí, not just the zì, and the commentaries are a key source for distinguishing the cí. And without attempting this, the sort of unsettledness I keep insisting on persists.

     In short, failing to parse the cí introduces an artificial vagueness that is different from the sort of cultivated indeterminacy you stress.

     Note:
     [i] Concerning yóu in the Zhuāngzǐ, and excluding binomes like the traditionally important tiānyóu 天遊 (esp. for Lín Xīyì 林希逸 and Lín Yúnmíng 林雲銘) and the recurrent yóuxīn 遊心, Wáng Shìshùn 王世舜 and Hán Mùjūn 韩慕君 count 26 tokens of the zì 字 (graph) yóu 游 representing six distinct cí 詞 (lexemes/words) and 68 tokens of the zì 字 (graph) yóu 遊 representing six somewhat overlapping cí 詞 (lexemes/words). In the 8 volumes of Zhuāngzǐ zuǎnyào 莊子纂要, Fāng Yǒng 方勇 goes into remarkable detail and notes different possible breakdowns for key words throughout the entire Zhuāngzǐ in the compiled jiàokān 校勘 (i.e., roughly the sort of glosses you single out as especially useful).

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