A Reader’s Companion to the Confucian Analects pdf

Henry Rosemont received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Washington, and pursued postdoctoral studies in Linguistics (and politics) with Noam Chomsky at MIT. His areas of research and writing are Chinese philosophy & religion – especially early Confucianism – moral and political theory, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of language. He has written A Chinese Mirror (1991), Rationality & Religious Experience (2001), and with Huston Smith, the forthcoming Is There a Universal ‘Grammar’ of Religion? (2007). He has edited and/or translated ten other books, including Explorations in Early Chinese Cosmology(1984), Leibniz: Writings on China (with D.J. Cook, 1994), Chinese Texts & Philosophical Contexts, and with Roger T.Ames, The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (1998), and The Classic of Family Reverence (2008). From 1982-84, and again in 1993-94 he was Fulbright Senior Professor of Philosophy & Linguistics at Fudan University in Shanghai, where he is now Senior Consulting Professor, and concurrently Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University.

A Reader’s Companion to the Confucian Analects pdf by Henry Rosemont

The major purpose of this little book is to make it easier for you the reader to come to terms with, and profit from one that is even smaller in the original, the Analects, which is made up of a number of statements of, by and about Confucius, the Latinized rendering of the name of China’s most famous thinker. Further on I shall have much to say about that book, but first I need to say a few things about this one. It is intended basically as a preface or prolegomenon to the Analects rather than a synopsis of its contents, perhaps best construed as a tool: I have put together a series of comments, hints, finding lists and suggestions to aid readers in coming to their own interpretation of the book, necessary if it is to enrich and possibly transform their philosophical and/or religious orientations. The 511 little “sayings” that comprise the book have spoken to countless thousands across the ages, but they have not said the same things even to all readers within a single time period, let alone over the course of two millennia, in very different cultural circumstances.