1. Aristotle uses two Greek words for the “mean”: meson, and mesotēs. The translations of these two terms differ. The Loeb renders mesotēs both as “mean” and “mean state,” and meson as “mean.” The Revised Oxford Translation (ROT) translates mesotēs as “mean,” and meson as “intermediate.” Lesley Brown disputes that to render meson as “intermediate” fails to capture the normative use of this word which means something like “intermediate and correct” or “appropriate.” She chooses instead to translate meson as “mean,” and mesotēs as “mean state.” See her “What is ‘The Mean Relative to Us’ in Aristotle's Ethics?” Phronesis 42 (January, 1997): 79, note 6. I replace ROT's “intermediate” with “mean” in the quotations where meson is used, but will mark the Greek word that is used in the original text whenever the translation word “mean” appears.
2. In English translations, “mean” is a rendering of both Chinese words zhongyong and zhong. In quoting Confucian classics, I use “mean” throughout, but will mark which Chinese word is used in the original text.
3. The Doctrine of the Mean provides a metaphysical foundation for Confucius's theory of the mean (and thus also for his ethics as a whole). Kanaya Osamu splits The Doctrine of the Mean into two halves and suggests that the first half but not the second should be discussed together with the Analects. See his “The Mean in Original Confucianism,” in Chinese Language, Thought, and Culture, ed. Philip J. Ivanhoe (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996), 83. Yet the mean as an ethical disposition and as a metaphysical reality is consistent in Confucianism.
4. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 36. Jonathan Barnes also claims, in his introduction to The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 1976, 24-26), that the doctrine of the mean “has no practical or advisory force.” “Virtue is not, in any literal sense of the term, a matter of picking the mid-point.” “Had Aristotle written a third ethical treatise, the celebrated Doctrine would not, I conjecture, have appeared in it.” See also Rosalind Hursthouse, “A False Doctrine of the Mean,” Aristotelian Society Proceedings (1980-81): 57-72.
5. Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 96. Probably out of this understanding, Chan treats lightly the idea of the mean in the Analects. Indeed, in his invaluable Source Book, he does not even include the crucial statement of A. 6:29 that the mean is the supreme virtue.