Overcoming Our Evil is a very fine book, particularly from a scholar new to the field. Stalnaker demonstrates a linguistic expertise with both the Western and Chinese materials, and a mature consciousness of the comparative issues involved. He rightly and successfully contributes to comparative ethics and methodology and to the project of retrieving classics wisely but selectively for today, and also, more simply, to our broader understanding of evil, virtue, and the path of virtue in a constructive fashion. Overcoming Our Evil is, in other words, a multilevel and integral work that raises the standard for solid comparative scholarship. -- Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Harvard Divinity School The importance in our own times of cross-cultural exchanges of ethical and spiritual wisdom begs for a more creative conception of a shareable past. Aaron Stalnaker's comparative study of two classical figures, Xunzi and Augustine, goes well beyond the mix-and-match quality of much comparative analysis and articulates a rich and coherent basis for a tradition of the virtues focused on the notion (made current by Pierre Hadot) of a spiritual exercise. For those of us grappling with the challenge of comparative analysis or with the distinctive legacies of two formative voices in the history of human ethics, Stalnaker's study is exemplary. -- James Wetzel, Augustinian Endowed Chair in Philosophy, Villanova University Stark differences on two subjects are often thought to characterize the thought of the Christian West and Confucian China, or even Western and East Asia religions. First is the role of evil in accounts of human nature and affairs; crucial to Christianity and marginal, at most, to Confucianism. Second is the importance of spiritual practices; crucial to Confucianism and marginal, at most, to Christianity. In a careful study of two thinkers central to each tradition, a study that also contains a set of astute methodological reflections, Professor Stalnaker both nuances and challenges these two presumptions. Moreover, his study also shows how a detailed comparison of two apparently radically different thinkers can aid constructive inquiry in the areas of both comparative studies and religious ethics. -- Lee H. Yearley, Walter Y. Evans Wentz Professor, Stanford University As Stalnaker argues, the comparative project is central to the academic study of religion, and is a particularly urgent endeavor in our current age of globalization and cultural conflict. This study is an example of comparison done right: detailed, nuanced, and historically responsible, while never losing sight of larger themes relevant to contemporary moral inquiry. -- Edward Slingerland, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition, University of British Columbia

Can people ever really change? Do they ever become more ethical, and if so, how? "Overcoming Our Evil" focuses on the way ethical and religious commitments are conceived and nurtured through the methodical practices that Pierre Hadot has called 'spiritual exercises'. These practices engage thought, imagination, and sensibility, and have a significant ethical component, yet aim for a broader transformation of the whole personality. Going beyond recent philosophical and historical work that has focused on ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, Stalnaker broadens ethical inquiry into spiritual exercises by examining East Asian as well as classical Christian sources, and taking religious and seemingly 'aesthetic' practices such as prayer, ritual, and music more seriously as objects of study. More specifically, "Overcoming Our Evil" examines and compares the thought and practice of the early Christian Augustine of Hippo, and the early Confucian Xunzi. Both have sophisticated and insightful accounts of spiritual exercises, and both make such ethical work central to their religious thought and practice. Yet to understand the two thinkers' recommendations for cultivating virtue we must first understand some important differences. Here Stalnaker disentangles the competing aspects of Augustine and Xunxi's ideas of 'human nature'. His groundbreaking comparison of their ethical vocabularies also drives a substantive analysis of fundamental issues in moral psychology, especially regarding emotion and the complex idea of 'the will', to examine how our dispositions to feel, think, and act might be slowly transformed over time. The comparison meticulously constructs vivid portraits of both thinkers demonstrating where they connect and where they diverge, making the case that both have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. In throwing light on these seemingly disparate ancient figures in unexpected ways, Stalnaker redirects recent debate regarding practices of personal formation, and more clearly exposes the intellectual and political issues involved in the retrieval of 'classic' ethical sources in diverse contemporary societies, illuminating a path toward a contemporary understanding of difference.