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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2018
1. Csikszentmihalyi, Mark, “Confucius and the Analects in the Han,” in Confucius and the “Analects”: New Essays, ed. Van Norden, Bryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 134–62Google Scholar.
2. Edward Slingerland, Body and Mind in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Slingerland, Edward, Nichols, Ryan, Nielbo, Kristoffer, Logan, Carson, “The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85.4 (2017), 985–1016CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. One minor quibble is that the captioning of the figures is hit or miss. For instance, Figure 1 on p. 13 consists of circles representing texts that serve as sources of Kongzi material. The significance of their relative size remains a complete mystery until we are told on p. 45 that “the area of each circle is proportional to the total number of characters a text devoted to quoting, representing, and/or discussing Kongzi”—a key fact that belongs in the original figure caption. We are also never told the meaning of the dashed circles alongside the main figure, representing the Laozi, Shijing, Shujing and New Testament Gospels. Presumably the size of these circles represents total number of characters in these texts, to give us a comparative sense of the size of the broader Kongzi literature, but their existence is never actually explained.
4. To give just a couple examples, Hunter notes that, in a Xunzi anecdote, Confucius refuses to answer a disciple’s question about ritual practice in Lu until it is rephrased as a question about ritual in general, which he sees as evidence of Confucius’s cosmopolitan, origin-less nature (p. 68). This begs the question of why the disciple thought it sensible to focus on Lu in the first place. Similarly, when reporting Confucius’s comment on a temple fire in Lu, Hunter sees the fact that the Zuozhuan authors go out of their way to mention that Confucius was in Chen at the time as evidence of “a reluctance to portray Kongzi unequivocally as a man of Lu” (p. 73). A simpler and more reasonable explanation is that these authors knew that readers would otherwise assume that Confucius was in Lu at the time, which in turn supports the traditional link between Lu and Kongzi.
5. Brooks, E. Bruce and Brooks, A. Taeko, The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Slingerland, Edward, “Review: Why Philosophy Is Not ‘Extra’ in Understanding the Analects,” Philosophy East and West 50.1 (2000), 137–41Google Scholar.
6. Hunter mentions in passing my review of Brooks and Brooks (“Why Philosophy Is Not ‘Extra’”), where I first advanced this argument against Brooks and Brooks’ accretion model of the Lun yu, as well as Paul R. Goldin’s similar arguments in a long-delayed, but apparently forthcoming, volume: Paul Goldin, “Confucius and His Disciples in the Analects: The Basis for the Traditional View,” in Confucius and the Analects Revisited: New Perspectives on Dating, Composition, and Authorship, ed. Michael Hunter and Martin Kern (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). He does not engage our arguments other than to dismiss them in a sparse footnote near the end of the book with the cryptic observation that using philosophical concepts to date the Lun yu is an example of falling “into the trap of applying implicitly Lunyu-centric models to the assessment of Lunyu centrism itself” (p. 315, cf. note 1). It is hard to know what is meant by this claim as it stands. Based on personal communication, I assume that the point is that the perceived absence in the Lun yu of what we think of as “late” Warring States ideas and terminology is itself dependent on a traditional chronology that assigns certain texts to the “late” period. As I will argue below, however, an argument based on presence or absence of philosophical ideas or terms need not assume the traditional chronology, or even that our received early Chinese corpus was assembled any time before the Western Han. It establishes a pattern that needs to be explained somehow, with a chronological explanation merely being the most natural and least convoluted option.
7. Goldin, “Confucius and His Disciples in the Analects.”
8. The received text of the Daodejing does evince some awareness of the Environment X conceptual world.
9. His one oblique attempt to present a very partial response is a passing comment that our received Lun yu probably omits any reference to raging debates about human nature because the topic was “too controversial” (p. 308) for the vanilla Confucius the compilers were aiming for. This is unconvincing, especially considering the decidedly non-vanilla nature of our received Lun yu’s Confucius.
10. Goldin, “Confucius and His Disciples in the Analects.”
11. Csikszentmihalyi, Mark, Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China (Leiden: Brill, 2004)Google Scholar.
12. Slingerland, Body and Mind in Early China; Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013)Google Scholar.
13. See Slingerland, Body and Mind in Early China: Ch. 4 for an introduction; Nichols, Ryan, Slingerland, Edward, Nielbo, Kristoffer, Bergeton, Uffe, Logan, Carson, Kleinman, Scott, “Modeling the Contested Relationship between Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi: Preliminary Evidence from a Machine-Learning Approach,” The Journal of Asian Studies 77.1 (2018), 19–57, doi: 10.1017/S0021911817000973CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Slingerland et al., “The Distant Reading of Religious Texts” for some applications to pre-modern Chinese materials.
14. Nichols et al., “Modeling the Contested Relationship between Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi.”
15. Slingerland, Edward and Chudek, Maciej, “The Prevalence of Mind-Body Dualism in Early China,” Cognitive Science 35 (2011), 997–1007CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
16. Goldin, “Confucius and His Disciples in the Analects.”
17. Watson, Burton, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 86Google Scholar.
18. Several of the supposedly smoking guns that Hunter sees as evidence of the Lunyu’s suspiciously mysterious origins are not, in fact, terribly hot. These include the compilers of the text’s failure to explain “where their text came from and how it should be read” (4), or the fact that the Han imperial librarian Liu Xiang (79–8 b.c.e.), in claiming that the Analect s consists of teachings recorded by Confucius’s disciples, does not explicitly explain how he knows this (5). There is nothing unusual about either of these facts.
19. See Slingerland, Edward, Confucius: Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003)Google Scholar.
