Henry Rosemont Libri

Drawing on four decades of expertise, Henry Rosemont offers a comprehensive analysis of the Analects, enhancing understanding through detailed resources. The book includes tables of variant spellings of Chinese terms, a finding list of referenced students, and a concordance of essential philosophical and religious concepts. Additionally, an annotated bibliography is provided to facilitate further exploration and reflection on the text, making it an invaluable resource for both scholars and students of Confucian philosophy.

Exploring the impact of various religions on intellectual evolution, the book highlights their significance for humanity's future. It emphasizes how these belief systems enrich non-material aspects of life, fostering a profound sense of belonging among individuals.

The essays collected in this volume establish Confucian role ethics as a term of art in the contemporary ethical discourse. The holistic philosophy presented here is grounded in the primacy of relationality and a narrative understanding of person, and is a challenge to a foundational liberal individualism that has defined persons as discrete, autonomous, rational, free, and often self-interested agents. Confucian role ethics begins from a relationally constituted conception of person, takes family roles and relations as the entry point for developing moral competence, invokes moral imagination and the growth in relations that it can inspire as the substance of human morality, and entails a human-centered, atheistic religiousness that stands in sharp contrast to the Abrahamic religions.

The book critiques the notion of individuals as free and autonomous beings, arguing that this perspective, while once liberating, has become detrimental to understanding and achieving social justice, democracy, and environmental solutions. It emphasizes the need for a Confucian rethinking of morality, politics, family, and religion, suggesting that individualism obscures the interconnectedness essential for addressing contemporary global challenges.