Unsolicited Advice to Students and Their Advisors (by guest blogger Bryan Van Norden)
This blog entry is by Bryan Van Norden, Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Department of Chinese and Japanese at Vassar College.
Thank you to Eric for kindly allowing me to be a guest blogger for the next few weeks. The first topic I would like to write about is the importance of knowing the secondary literature in one's field.
1. The Problem
I recently wrote a Letter to the Editor that was published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the APA. In it, I described my experience when my department was interviewing job candidates. I noted that we met many terrific young philosophers, and ended up hiring someone we are delighted with. However, we also discovered that many job candidates are not familiar with even the most basic secondary literature on their areas of research (including the work of their own supposed advisors). I concluded the letter by reminding my fellow philosophers of the obvious (I hope) fact that professors have an obligation to train their graduate students. I was writing primarily about "mainstream" philosophy, but my experience has been the same in Chinese philosophy.
So my claim is that it is crucial to know the secondary literature and that far too many people get doctorates without knowing it (or even knowing that it is important).
2. Why Is It a Problem?
I don't know how many people would actually come out and say it, but I think there is a common view that it is not important to know the secondary literature. This view has several sources.
Isn't what's really important that we read the PRIMARY texts?
It's crucial that we read the primary texts! But it is not enough to read the primary texts.
Oh yeah? Why not?
Newton famously said, "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." By this he meant that his work would have been impossible without building upon the previous research of people like Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. Where would we be today if Newton had remained ignorant of them? So even in natural science, which people often think of as an enterprise that can "prove" things independently of tradition, it is impossible to achieve progress without building upon previous research.
But I want to think independently! I don't want to just parrot what people in the past have said on this topic.
Good! But you won't be able to do so unless you become self-aware about what assumptions you bring to the text. Descartes set the tone for much of modern philosophy when he said he was going to reject tradition and custom and just think for himself. Almost everyone today proudly rejects the content of Descartes' claims, but it is far too common to implicitly assume that the methodology (confronting reality with one's individual thoughts) is correct. But the methodology is fundamentally flawed as well. Descartes was certainly original in many ways, but (as any serious historian of modern philosophy will tell you) his work is deeply dependent upon its Platonistic, Aristotelian, Augustinean and Scholastic sources. ("I think therefore I am" is a paraphrase of a line from Augustine's Confessions.)
The issue isn't whether we should be original or not. The issue is whether we can be original and insightful while we are ignorant.
Give me an example of what you are talking about.
Okay. I have heard more than one person ingenuously discuss "Mengzi's claim that human nature is originally good." There's just one problem: Mengzi never says that. Mengzi says that human nature is good, simpliciter. The "originally" is a Neo-Confucian gloss. Even people who have read the primary text often assume the Neo-Confucian reading. But this is the sort of issue raised in the secondary literature.
In general, the problem is that you can't be open-minded if you don't know what the alternatives are to your view.
If the secondary literature is so interesting, just tell me what it says.
What would you say to a student who told you, "I didn't do the reading. Just tell me what it said and I'll argue with you about whether what you say is right."
But don't you think dialogue is important?
Absolutely! But the secondary literature is PART of the dialogue. Besides, if you don't know the secondary literature and I do, how productive will my conversation with you be?
But research is hard work. It's more fun to just chat about my impressions of the text.
Aw, I suspected that was the root of it all! ;)
3. The Solution
I'd like to conclude with a list of what are, in my opinion, the absolutely essential secondary readings for anyone interested in pre Qin dynasty Chinese philosophy. (One could easily add to this list, but I think it would be hard to say anything on it is optional for someone who claims to have an AOS in this area.)
Chan, Alan K.L., ed. Mencius: Contexts and Interpretations (U Hawaii Press).
Cook, Scott, ed. Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi (SUNY Press).
Csikszentmihalyi, Mark and PJ Ivanhoe, eds., Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi (SUNY Press).
Creel, Herrlee. Confucius and the Chinese Way (out of print).
Fingarette, Herbert. Confucius -- the Secular as Sacred (Harper Torchbooks).
Goldin, Paul. After Confucius (U of Hawaii Press).
Graham, A.C. Disputers of the Tao (Open Court).
Graham, A.C. Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (SUNY Press).
Hall, David and Roger Ames. Thinking through Confucius. (Or at least one other book in the trilogy they wrote, which includes Thinking from the Han and Anticipating China.)
Hansen, Chad. Language and Logic in Ancient China (U of Michigan Press). (Or his A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought.)
Harbsmeier, Christoph. Language and Logic. Vol 7, Part 1 of Joseph Needham, ed., Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge U Press). (Or A.C. Graham's Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science. Some of the same material is also covered in Graham's Disputers of the Tao.)
Ivanhoe, Philip J. Confucian Moral Self Cultivation. 2nd ed. (Hackett).
Kjellberg, Paul and PJ Ivanhoe, eds., Essays on Skepticism, Relativism and Ethics in the Zhuangzi (SUNY Press).
Kline, Thornton and PJ Ivanhoe, eds., Virtue, Nature and Agency in the Xunzi (Hackett).
Kohn, Livia and Michael LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching (SUNY Press).
Kupperman, Joel. Learning from Asian Philosophy(Oxford).
Liu, Xiusheng and P.J. Ivanhoe, eds., Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi (Hackett).
Mair, Victor. Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu (U of Hawaii).
Nivison, David S. The Ways of Confucianism (Open Court).
Schwartz, Benjamin. The World of Thought in Ancient China (Harvard/Belknap).
Shun, Kwong-loi. Mencius and Early Chinese Thought (Stanford U Press).
Tu, Wei-ming. Centrality and Commonality (SUNY Press).
Van Norden, Bryan W., ed. Confucius and the Analects: New Essays (Oxford). (This is the only secondary anthology in English on this topic.)
Wong, David. Natural Moralities (Oxford).
Yearley, Lee H. Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (SUNY Press).