Roger T. Ames b. 1947

Roger T. Ames is a Canadian philosopher, Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University and emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii, and one of the most influential English-language interpreters of classical Chinese philosophy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With his long-time collaborator David Hall he produced the Thinking from the Han trilogy, which read Confucian philosophy through the lens of process and pragmatist thought, and a series of philosophical translations of the Analects, the Daodejing, and the Zhongyong. His Confucian Role Ethics has defended a distinctive Confucian alternative to the deontological and consequentialist frameworks dominant in Anglophone moral philosophy.

Roger T. Ames was born in 1947 in Toronto and grew up in British Columbia. He took his bachelor's at the University of Redlands and the National Taiwan University, his master's and doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1978, and joined the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, where he taught Chinese and comparative philosophy until his retirement in 2016 and edited the journal Philosophy East and West. Since 2016 he has been Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University.

With his long-time collaborator David L. Hall he wrote Thinking Through Confucius (1987), Anticipating China (1995), Thinking from the Han (1998), and the Democracy of the Dead (1999); his translations and commentaries include Sun-Tzu: The Art of Warfare (1993), the Confucian Analects (1998), the Daodejing (2003), and Focusing the Familiar: A Translation and Philosophical Interpretation of the Zhongyong (2001). His own monographs include Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011) and Human Becomings: Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics (2021).

Ames argues that the categories of substance metaphysics imported by early Western translators distort classical Chinese thought, which is better read as a process-oriented 'ars contextualis' in which persons are constituted by their relations and roles. His Confucian role ethics presents Confucian moral life as the cultivation of relational virtues rather than the application of principles to autonomous selves.