Roger T. Ames

Roger T. Ames (born 12 December 1947) is a Canadian-born philosopher, translator, and author.

He is Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing, China, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a Berggruen Fellow.

He has made significant contributions to the study of Chinese and comparative philosophy, in which he emphasizes the importance of understanding Chinese philosophy on its own terms rather than through the lens of Western philosophy.

Roger Ames was born in Toronto, Canada, and raised in England and Vancouver.

He is married with two sons.

He received his bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia (UBC) where he studied philosophy and Chinese language.

While attending UBC, he took the opportunity to spend one academic year at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, his first exposure to China.

After graduating from UBC, he began his graduate work at National Taiwan University (1970–1972), where he studied with Yang Youwei (楊有維).

He returned to UBC to finish his master's degree (1973), then he spent two years living in Japan.

In 1975, he began his Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, where he studied under the tutelage of D. C. Lau.

He completed his Ph.D. thesis in 1978, titled The "Chu Shu" chapter of the Huai-Nan-Tzu: The sources and orientation of its political thought.

Ames became the editor of the academic journal Philosophy East and West in 1987, the editor of the book review publication China Review International, the editor and co-editor (with David L. Hall) of the "Chinese Philosophy and Culture" Series as well as (with Paul J. D'Ambrosio) the "Translating China" series with State University of New York Press.

He also served as Director for the Center for Chinese Studies at UHM and Co-Director (with Peter D. Hershock) for the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP), and as Director and Co-Director of the East-West Philosophers' Conferences, the largest gathering of non-Western and comparative philosophers, with as many as 300 presenters, held in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2011, and 2016.

Ames has been a visiting professor at National University of Singapore and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a Fulbright Professor at Wuhan University and Peking University.

He has received many awards, including the Confucian Culture Award at the 2013 World Congress of Confucianism in Beijing, and the Huilin Culture Award from Beijing Normal University in China in 2016.

Ames has written around 100 scholarly articles, published in prominent academic journals in the United States and abroad.

That same year, he accepted an offer for an assistant professorship from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and he remained there until he retired in 2016.

He is currently Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing, China.

While a member of the faculty at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM), Ames joined Eliot Deutsch, already a prominent academic and advocate of Chinese and comparative philosophy, and others to continue the tradition begun by Charles A. Moore and Wing-tsit Chan to establish UHM as the hub for non-Western and comparative philosophy and intellectual exchange in the United States.