Meet the Faculty

Aaron Stalnaker

  • Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

  • Ph.D. at Brown University, 2001

Contact Information

Sycamore Hall, Rm. 219
(812) 855-8089

Background

  • Trustees Teaching Award, Indiana University, Dept. of Religious Studies, 2007
  • Poynter Center Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University 2005
  • Georgetown University Summer Research Grant, 2003
  • Joukowsky Foundation award for the best dissertation in the humanities at Brown, 2001
  • Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, Spencer Foundation, 2000-2001
  • Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, U. S. Department of Education, 1995-1999
  • Dean's Fellowship, Brown University, 1994-1995
  • Phi Beta Kappa, Stanford University, 1990

Aaron Stalnaker I study ethics and philosophy of religion, with serious attention to both Chinese and Western theories and practices.  I thus care about methods and tools of interpretation and comparison, and the relations of thought, culture, and history in diverse settings.  Substantively, I am most interested in the relevance of ancient conceptions of human excellence and character formation to life in contemporary heterogeneous, democratic societies. 

My first book examines and compares the accounts of ethico-religious practices of personal formation advocated by the early Confucian Xunzi and the early Christian Augustine of Hippo. It addresses contemporary debates in religious ethics about moral agency, sin and evil, and the purposeful cultivation of virtuous emotions and desires.  In my next book project, tentatively entitled Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Hierarchy, I examine vexing issues of justice amid hierarchy that seem to be intrinsic to practices of moral cultivation, e.g., in teacher-student or “master-disciple” relations, and which are not adequately addressed in contemporary theorizing about political authority. 

I founded and currently chair the Comparative Religious Ethics Group within the American Academy of Religion.

Research Interests

  • Comparative religious ethics
  • Philosophy of religions (theistic, non-theistic, and comparative)
  • Chinese Thought
  • Christian Thought
  • Moral Philosophy
  • Theories of religion

Courses Recently Taught

  • Conceptions of the Self, East & West
  • Friendship, Benevolence, & Love
  • Introduction to Chinese Thought
  • Religion, Virtue, and the Good Life
  • Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Exercises
  • Practices of the Self

Publication Highlights

Book

Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine. Moral Traditions series, ed. James Keenan, Georgetown University Press, 2006.

Essays

"The Mencius-Xunzi Debate in Early Confucian Ethics." In Teaching Confucianism, ed. Jeffrey L. Richey, AAR’s Teaching Religion series (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

"Transforming the Self:  Confession and Performance in the Thought of Augustine and Xunzi"In Augustine and World Religions, ed. Kim Paffenroth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, under contract, forthcoming)

"Focus Introduction:  Anthropos and Ethics: Categories of Inquiry and Procedures of Comparison” (co-authored with Mark Berkson, Thomas Lewis, and Jon Schofer).  Journal of Religious Ethics 33.2 (Summer 2005): 177-185.

"Comparative Religious Ethics and the Problem of ‘Human Nature.’"  Journal of Religious Ethics 33.2 (Summer 2005): 187-224.

"Spiritual Exercises and the Grace of God:  Paradoxes of Personal Formation in Augustine."  Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 24.2 (Fall/Winter 2004): 137-170.

"Rational Justification in Xunzi:  On His Use of the Term Lǐ 理." International Philosophical Quarterly 44.1 (March 2004): 53-68.

"Aspects of Xunzi’s Engagement with Early Daoism."Philosophy East and West 53.1 (March 2003): 87-129.

Invited Lectures

"Virtue as Mastery in Early Chinese Thought."  Presented at the Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association,  April 2007

"Confucian Democracy and the Virtue of Deference."  Presented at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, December 2005

"‘West’ Implies ‘East’: Comparison and the Characterization of Distinctive Civilizations.’" Presented at Georgetown University as one of four Provost's Seminars on Western civilization and its role in the intellectual agenda of the contemporary academy, December 2003

"Xunzi on Emotions." Presented at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, for a conference on Xunzi, responding to a recent anthology of critical essays, March 2001