Reading the Analects Today

One of China's most prominent contemporary philosophers reads and comments on one of the central texts in the Chinese philosophical tradition.

In this book, one of contemporary China's most prominent philosophers, Li Zehou, explores one of the central texts in the Chinese philosophical tradition, the Analects of Confucius. While the book provides an introduction to the Analects itself and to Confucianism in general, it also serves as an introduction to Li's own thought, particularly the ways in which he regarded the Confucian tradition as relevant to postrevolutionary contemporary China. Key topics include the role of Confucianism in the Chinese tradition and in contemporary China; Confucianism's quasi-religious, quasi-philosophical character; Li's views on emotion, morality, and fate in Confucianism; and his call for a separation of public social morality from private religious morality in modern China. Translated here by Maija Bell Samei, Reading the "Analects" Today is among the most accessible of Li Zehou's works and will be of interest not only to philosophers but to scholars and students of both modern and traditional Chinese intellectual, social, and religious history.

Li Zehou (1930–2021) was a philosopher who taught in both China and the United States. His many books include A History of Classical Chinese Thought and The Path of Beauty: A Study of Chinese Aesthetics. Maija Bell Samei is the author of Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice: The Abandoned Woman in Early Chinese Song Lyrics and the translator of The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition, also by Li Zehou, and Seven Lectures on Wang Guowei's Renjian Cihua, by Florence Chia-ying Yeh.