Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Conventions Chapter One: Paradoxes of Freedom: Modern Western Difficulties with Authority and Dependence
Chapter Two: Early China and the Quest for Mastery
Chapter Three: Virtue, Skill, and Mastery
Chapter Four: The Confucian Dào: Mastery as the Fruit of Shared Practices
Chapter Five: Dependence, Autonomy, and the Varieties of Relationship
Chapter Six: Dreaming of a Meritocracy, Grappling with Reality Chapter Seven: Learning from the Early Confucians Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Aaron Stalnaker is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine (Georgetown University Press, 2006), and has published articles in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings, Philosophy East and West, Dao, and International Philosophical Quarterly, among other venues. He founded the Comparative
Religious Ethics group within the American Academy of Religion, and is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics.