Ian Hunter
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3620439 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Ian Hunter |
| NOMBRES | Ian |
| APELLIDO | Hunter |
| FIRMA | HUNTER I |
| AFILIACIONES | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9919-3652 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 53 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 179 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1962 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Creative Disintegration
Michael Sonenscher's After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought offers a rich overview of nineteenth-century French, Swiss, and German political thought. The work's central argument is that modern political thought emerges in a series of attempts to close germinal "gaps" opened in the fabric of European intellectual life by Kant's philosophy and philosophical history. Less a narrative than a bricolage…
Philosophy, Rights and Natural Law
The invention of human nature
In treating human nature as a ‘moral entity’, imposed by God for reasons into which man could have no direct insight, Samuel Pufendorf reconfigured the architecture of natural law thought in a fundamental way. For this meant that rather than deducing norms from a nature in which they had been embedded by God and could be discerned by self-reflective reason, man had to derive them by observing the requirements of the exigent condition in which he …
The Contest Over Context in Intellectual History
Recent articles critical of the use of context in contextual intellectual history have identified contextual method with the post-1960s work of the "Cambridge School," which is regarded as being grounded in a flawed theory of textual interpretation. Focusing on German cultural and political history, this article shows that a contextual historiography was already fully developed in seventeenth-century ecclesiastical history, and a parallel version…
Secularisation
Today's dominant academic use of the term 'secularisation' refers to an epochal process that transformed a society based on Christian faith to one grounded in human reason. This paper argues that 'secularisation' had not been used in this sense prior to the 1830s, and that no such process has been shown to have taken place in early modernity. This new use of the term was in fact internal to rival secularising and sacralising programs. The notion …
Public Law and the Limits of Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben’s genealogy of office
This paper offers a historical redescription of the genealogy of office presented in Giorgio Agamben’s Opus Dei: An archaeology of duty. Agamben’s treatment of the Christian liturgy as the source of the modern concept of office is described as a Heideggerian allegory grounded in a metaphysical history of being
Giorgio Agamben’s Form of Life
Giorgio Agamben’s discourse on Franciscan monasticism is generally received in accordance with his presentation of it: as a genealogy or archaeology of the way in which the Franciscans were the first to embody an exemplary form of life. This paper offers a different view, arguing that Agamben’s account of the Franciscans is actually an allegory whose underlying structure and meaning is supplied by Heideggerian metaphysics. One of the striking fea…
Heideggerian Mathematics
This paper provides a historical redescription and reinterpretation of Alain Badiou's major work, Being and Event. The work is approached historically, as a text that uses Heideggerian metaphysics to perform an allegorical exegesis of mathematical set theory and does so as a means of fashioning a supremacist spiritual pedagogy for a philosophical elite in the context of a national intellectual subculture
Kant’s Political Thought in the Prussian Enlightenment
This chapter provides an historical account of Immanuel Kant’s political and religious writings by situating them in the context of the Prussian Enlightenment.
Secularization
This essay argues that today's dominant understanding of secularization—as an epochal transition from a society based on religious belief to one based on autonomous human reason—first appeared in philosophical histories at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was then anachronistically applied to early modern Europe. Apart from the earlier and persisting canon-law use of the term to refer to a species of exclaustration, prior to 1800 the s…
The Mythos, Ethos, and Pathos of the Humanities
Justifications of the humanities often employ a mythos that exceeds their historical dispositions and reach. This applies to justifications that appeal to an ‘idea’ of the humanities grounded in the cultivation of reason for its own sake. But the same problem affects more recent accounts that seek to shatter this idea by admitting an ‘event’ capable of dissolving and refounding the humanities in ‘being’. In offering a sketch of the emergence of t…
Religious Freedom in Early Modern Germany
It is sometimes presumed that early modern religious conflict can be understood (and judged) on the basis of philosophical principles of religious freedom that display the irrationality of such conflict. Some derive these principles from Lockean and Kantian doctrines purporting to show that religions can be a matter of free rational choice and mutual toleration. Others derive them from Thomistic and communitarian traditions that purport to show t…
Hayden White's Philosophical History
Hayden White's philosophical history is usually approached as a theory and history of historical consciousness capable of being true or false. In this paper I argue that it is better described as the instrument and effect of a cultural politics aimed at the subordination of empirical historiography to a rival intellectual subculture. This subculture first emerged in 1780s Protestant Germany in the form of Kant's metaphysical anthropology. But it …
Kant and Vattel in Context
A good deal of the late-twentieth-century commentary on Kant's ‘Perpetual Peace’ essay accepted its author's view that his conception of cosmopolitan justice had superseded the law of nations, some of whose leading exponents—Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel—Kant characterised as ‘miserable comforters’. Focusing on the case of Vattel, in this paper I begin to subject Kant's claim to an historical investigation, asking whether his ‘Perpetual Peace’ d…
History of Political Thought
Journal Article History of Political Thought Get access German History, Volume 30, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 75–99, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghr126 Published: 01 March 2012
Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought
A collection that focuses on the role of European law in colonial contexts and engages with recent treatments of this theme in known works written largely from within the framework of postcolonial stu
Vattel's Law of Nations
This paper argues that Vattel's Droit des gens cannot be adequately interpreted as based on a philosophical principle, whether of universal justice or of raison d'état. Rather, Vattel unfolds his law of nations within a casuistical discourse where inconsistent principles are deployed strategically. This forms an ethical space in which universal justice can be continuously adapted to the exigencies of national self-interest as interpreted by the d…
Scenes from the History of Poststructuralism
This paper tracks the proximate emergence of postructuralist theorizing to a series of receptions and transformations of the post-Kantian German university metaphysics elaborated by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It approaches this metaphysics not as a body of doctrine but as a practice of attuning the self to a privileged way of acceding to truth. This permits the paper to focus on a series of contingently related historical contexts in wh…
Spirituality and philosophy in post-structuralist theory
This paper discusses the role of a particular form of philosophical spirituality in the emergence of post-structuralist theory. Initially elaborated in the post-Kantian metaphysics of Husserl and Heidegger, and focused in recondite acts of intellectual self-transformation, this form of spirituality was transposed into a literary hermeneutics that permitted its wider dissemination in the Anglo-american humanities academy. Post-structuralist theory…
The Secularisation of the Confessional State
Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) was a tireless campaigner against the political enforcement of religion in the early modern confessional state. In a whole series of combative disputations - against heresy and witchcraft prosecutions, and in favour of religious toleration - Thomasius battled to lay the intellectual groundwork for the separation of church and state and the juridical basis for pluralistic societies. Ian Hunter departs from the usual…
Talking about My Generation
This article is a response to Fredric Jameson's criticisms of the author's 'The History of Theory' (Critical Inquiry 32/4, 2006). For Jameson's article, 'How Not to Historicise Theory', see Critical Inquiry, 34, Spring 2008. The author situates Jameson's arguments in the context of the historicisation of theory, treating them as an example of the (Marxist) theoretical program to think the historical determinations of thought. It is argued that th…
The Secularisation of the Confessional State
Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) was a tireless campaigner against the political enforcement of religion in the early modern confessional state. In a whole series of combative disputations - against heresy and witchcraft prosecutions, and in favour of religious toleration - Thomasius battled to lay the intellectual groundwork for the separation of church and state and the juridical basis for pluralistic societies. In this 2007 text, Ian Hunter dep…
The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher
Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it from fear that it might completely destroy the kingdom of darkness—that is, scholastic philosophy—which previously has been wrongly held to be a necessary instrument of theology
Making a little go further
Using case analysis, this article examines the sources of start-up and development capital for 133 entrepreneurs who began commercial enterprises in New Zealand between 1880 and 1910. Though capital markets were immature, entrepreneurs overcame this limitation by employing capital economizing techniques to start firms, and then continued to exert managerial control by reinvesting profits rather than borrowing. The results of this investigation of…
The History of Theory
Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects ... you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are t…
The Morals of Metaphysics
Lessons from the 'Literatory
The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher
Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it from fear that it might completely destroy the kingdom of darkness—that is, scholastic philosophy—which previously has been wrongly held to be a necessary instrument of theology
Personality as a vocation
In responding to periodic government demands that it provide a rational justification for its activities as a public utility, the humanities academy typically appeals to the absolute ethical and intellectual values of liberal education. This paper investigates the nature of this response and its relation to the governmental field. The historical, ethical and political claims involved in the appeal to liberal education are discussed and rejected. …
Secularization
This essay argues that today's dominant understanding of secularization—as an epochal transition from a society based on religious belief to one based on autonomous human reason—first appeared in philosophical histories at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was then anachronistically applied to early modern Europe. Apart from the earlier and persisting canon-law use of the term to refer to a species of exclaustration, prior to 1800 the s…
The time of theory
Those living in the time of theory are eventually faced with the task of comprehending the relation of theory to time. In one regard, to constitute the post-1960s ‘theory boom’ as an intellectual-h
Commodity Chains and Networks in Emerging Markets
This consideration of how innovation was exploited in primary processing industries during the period of the second industrial revolution draws on case material from frozen-meat and dairy-processing industries in New Zealand between 1880 and 1910, examining how entrepreneurial networks successfully created commodity chains for the exportation of produce to U.K. markets. Latin American commodity chains are considered as a counterpoint. What is sug…
Talking about My Generation
This article is a response to Fredric Jameson's criticisms of the author's 'The History of Theory' (Critical Inquiry 32/4, 2006). For Jameson's article, 'How Not to Historicise Theory', see Critical Inquiry, 34, Spring 2008. The author situates Jameson's arguments in the context of the historicisation of theory, treating them as an example of the (Marxist) theoretical program to think the historical determinations of thought. It is argued that th…
Walks of Life
After representation
It is argued that contemporary discussions of literary representation - organized around the category of experience and its structuralist critique - are misleading. First, it is shown that although literary experience does not provide a foundation for representation, such experience is, nonetherless, not merely a chimera projected from an unacknowledged 'grammar'. Second,it is shown that literary representations have conditions of possibility whi…
Kant and Vattel in Context
A good deal of the late-twentieth-century commentary on Kant's ‘Perpetual Peace’ essay accepted its author's view that his conception of cosmopolitan justice had superseded the law of nations, some of whose leading exponents—Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel—Kant characterised as ‘miserable comforters’. Focusing on the case of Vattel, in this paper I begin to subject Kant's claim to an historical investigation, asking whether his ‘Perpetual Peace’ d…
Spirituality and philosophy in post-structuralist theory
This paper discusses the role of a particular form of philosophical spirituality in the emergence of post-structuralist theory. Initially elaborated in the post-Kantian metaphysics of Husserl and Heidegger, and focused in recondite acts of intellectual self-transformation, this form of spirituality was transposed into a literary hermeneutics that permitted its wider dissemination in the Anglo-american humanities academy. Post-structuralist theory…
On Pornography
Preface - Acknowledgements - An Introduction - The Pornographic Field - Nineteenth-century English Obscenity Law - Literary Erotics - Twentieth-century English Obscenity Law - The Limits of Law Reform - United States Obscenity Law - Feminism and Law Reform - Endnotes - Bibliography - Index
Culture, education, and English
The history of popular literary education or ‘English’ is usually measured against the yard-stick of complete personal or social development provided by the concept of culture. This paper argues that the ide of complete development associated with culture. is in fact the emblem of a limited ethical practice possessing no general pertinence with regards to the apparatus of popular education. The development of this apparatus as an independent mora…
Public Law and the Limits of Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben’s Form of Life
Giorgio Agamben’s discourse on Franciscan monasticism is generally received in accordance with his presentation of it: as a genealogy or archaeology of the way in which the Franciscans were the first to embody an exemplary form of life. This paper offers a different view, arguing that Agamben’s account of the Franciscans is actually an allegory whose underlying structure and meaning is supplied by Heideggerian metaphysics. One of the striking fea…
Religious Freedom in Early Modern Germany
It is sometimes presumed that early modern religious conflict can be understood (and judged) on the basis of philosophical principles of religious freedom that display the irrationality of such conflict. Some derive these principles from Lockean and Kantian doctrines purporting to show that religions can be a matter of free rational choice and mutual toleration. Others derive them from Thomistic and communitarian traditions that purport to show t…
Hayden White's Philosophical History
Hayden White's philosophical history is usually approached as a theory and history of historical consciousness capable of being true or false. In this paper I argue that it is better described as the instrument and effect of a cultural politics aimed at the subordination of empirical historiography to a rival intellectual subculture. This subculture first emerged in 1780s Protestant Germany in the form of Kant's metaphysical anthropology. But it …
Christian Thomasius and the Desacralization of Philosophy
Despite his significance in early modern Germany, where he was well-known as a political and moral philosopher, jurist, lay-theologian, social and educational reformer, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) is little known in the world of Anglophone scholarship. 1 Unlike those of his mentor, Samuel Pufendorf, none of Thomasius's works was translated into English, when, at the end of the seventeenth century, English thinkers were searching for a final s…
The Contest Over Context in Intellectual History
Recent articles critical of the use of context in contextual intellectual history have identified contextual method with the post-1960s work of the "Cambridge School," which is regarded as being grounded in a flawed theory of textual interpretation. Focusing on German cultural and political history, this article shows that a contextual historiography was already fully developed in seventeenth-century ecclesiastical history, and a parallel version…
Giorgio Agamben’s genealogy of office
This paper offers a historical redescription of the genealogy of office presented in Giorgio Agamben’s Opus Dei: An archaeology of duty. Agamben’s treatment of the Christian liturgy as the source of the modern concept of office is described as a Heideggerian allegory grounded in a metaphysical history of being
Heideggerian Mathematics
This paper provides a historical redescription and reinterpretation of Alain Badiou's major work, Being and Event. The work is approached historically, as a text that uses Heideggerian metaphysics to perform an allegorical exegesis of mathematical set theory and does so as a means of fashioning a supremacist spiritual pedagogy for a philosophical elite in the context of a national intellectual subculture
The Mythos, Ethos, and Pathos of the Humanities
Justifications of the humanities often employ a mythos that exceeds their historical dispositions and reach. This applies to justifications that appeal to an ‘idea’ of the humanities grounded in the cultivation of reason for its own sake. But the same problem affects more recent accounts that seek to shatter this idea by admitting an ‘event’ capable of dissolving and refounding the humanities in ‘being’. In offering a sketch of the emergence of t…
The recovery of natural law
This book is discussed in the context of the ongoing recovery of a distinctively 'modern' or post-scholastic form of natural law thought. Hochstrasser's contribution to this recovery is to stress the linguistic-conventionalist character of post-metaphysical natural law in the German early Enlightenment. On this basis, he is able to show how Samuel Pufendorf and his followers largely escape the charges of moral arbitrariness and political tyranny …
The relation of achievement imagery scores to academic performance
The Constitutional Process in Canada
After representation
It is argued that contemporary discussions of literary representation - organized around the category of experience and its structuralist critique - are misleading. First, it is shown that although literary experience does not provide a foundation for representation, such experience is, nonetherless, not merely a chimera projected from an unacknowledged 'grammar'. Second,it is shown that literary representations have conditions of possibility whi…
Culture, education, and English
The history of popular literary education or ‘English’ is usually measured against the yard-stick of complete personal or social development provided by the concept of culture. This paper argues that the ide of complete development associated with culture. is in fact the emblem of a limited ethical practice possessing no general pertinence with regards to the apparatus of popular education. The development of this apparatus as an independent mora…
Culture and Government
Since the Romantics culture has been identified with the promise of a complete development of human capacities and, typically, the 'rise of English' has been viewed in terms of the (true or distorted)
The occasion of criticism
Personality as a vocation
In responding to periodic government demands that it provide a rational justification for its activities as a public utility, the humanities academy typically appeals to the absolute ethical and intellectual values of liberal education. This paper investigates the nature of this response and its relation to the governmental field. The historical, ethical and political claims involved in the appeal to liberal education are discussed and rejected. …
Lessons from the 'Literatory
History lessons for ‘English’
John Dixon is a deservedly prominent teacher of English teachers. His Growth Through English was perhaps the single most important manifesto-cum-manual for what has been known since the sixties as the 'personal growth' model of English. Still, it is one thing to practise a discipline and quite another to subject it to scholarly investigation. Apologists are rarely good historians or sociologists of their own disciplines. They are usually too conv…
On Pornography
Preface - Acknowledgements - An Introduction - The Pornographic Field - Nineteenth-century English Obscenity Law - Literary Erotics - Twentieth-century English Obscenity Law - The Limits of Law Reform - United States Obscenity Law - Feminism and Law Reform - Endnotes - Bibliography - Index
Walks of Life
Armed Pluralism
Literary Theory in Civil Life
Research Article| October 01 1996 Literary Theory in Civil Life Ian Hunter Ian Hunter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1996) 95 (4): 1099–1134. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-95-4-1099 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ian Hunter; Literary Theory in Civil Life. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 1996; 95 (4): 1099–1134. doi: https…
The Invention of Autonomy
The Invention of Autonomy
With this work J. B. Schneewind has provided the most comprehensive history of modern moral philosophy available in English. Beginning with the moral theology of the Reformation and ending with Kant, Schneewind's book offers a panorama of moral philosophy that includes the early modern natural lawyers and their metaphysical critics, the British sentimentalists and their rationalist opponents, and a whole series of eighteenth-century attempts to d…
Christian Thomasius and the Desacralization of Philosophy
Despite his significance in early modern Germany, where he was well-known as a political and moral philosopher, jurist, lay-theologian, social and educational reformer, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) is little known in the world of Anglophone scholarship. 1 Unlike those of his mentor, Samuel Pufendorf, none of Thomasius's works was translated into English, when, at the end of the seventeenth century, English thinkers were searching for a final s…
Popular Sovereignty and Civic Education
This article addresses some of the problems inherent in attempts to understand citizenship education through the concept of popular sovereignty and the formation of self-governing citizens. It does so via a historical investigation of the processes responsible for the separation of sovereignty and government and sovereignty and moral truth in the early modern state. It is argued that in losing sight of the importance of these separations for the …
Rival Enlightenments
Rival Enlightenments, first published in 2001, is a major reinterpretation of early modern German intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophical doctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historical circumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacralization. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius and the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intellectual cultures or paideiai…
The recovery of natural law
This book is discussed in the context of the ongoing recovery of a distinctively 'modern' or post-scholastic form of natural law thought. Hochstrasser's contribution to this recovery is to stress the linguistic-conventionalist character of post-metaphysical natural law in the German early Enlightenment. On this basis, he is able to show how Samuel Pufendorf and his followers largely escape the charges of moral arbitrariness and political tyranny …
Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty
In Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty new research by leading international scholars is brought to bear on a single crucial issue: the role of early modern natural law doctrines in reconstructing the r
The Morals of Metaphysics
Risk, Persistence and Focus
Adapting a life cycle model from managerial literature, conclusions are drawn about the nature of colonial entrepreneurship from a case analysis of 133 New Zealand entrepreneurs, active between 1880 and 1910. Five stages in the life cycle of the entrepreneur are investigated: preparation, embarkation, exploration, expansion and transformation. Characteristic behaviours observed include the prevalence of entrepreneurial partnerships; a propensity …
Commodity Chains and Networks in Emerging Markets
This consideration of how innovation was exploited in primary processing industries during the period of the second industrial revolution draws on case material from frozen-meat and dairy-processing industries in New Zealand between 1880 and 1910, examining how entrepreneurial networks successfully created commodity chains for the exportation of produce to U.K. markets. Latin American commodity chains are considered as a counterpoint. What is sug…
The State of History and the Empire of Metaphysics1
The Limits of History. By Constantin Fasolt
The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe
In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophy appears in a fresh light, not as reason's progressive discovery of its universal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled disputes over the proper way to conduct oneself as a philosopher. By shifting focus from the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason to the philosopher as a special persona arising from rival forms of self-cultivation, philosophy is appro…
Political science (41 obras) · Philosophy (33 obras) · Law (32 obras) · Sociology (31 obras) · Epistemology (28 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · History (19 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought (13 obras)