SUNY, Translating China

This book is a timely contribution to the growing field of the philosophy of the family. Drawing on a lifetime of research in Western and Chinese philosophy, Zhang Xianglong adopts a comparative perspective to navigate between Greek philosophy, phenomenology, and Confucianism to explore such topics as the nature of the family, filiality, human nature, temporality, memory, incest taboos, the future of Confucianism, and popular literature. He weaves his vast intercultural knowledge and understanding into penetrating philosophical, social, literary, and anthropological insights that reveal the strengths and weaknesses of Western and Chinese conceptions of the family. This book is a paradigm of comparative philosophy and demonstrates the value of the Chinese intellectual tradition for modern philosophy.

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.