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) fulfilment of this promise in the education system. This book presents a sustained and historically informed challenge to that view.
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, thereby challenging all histories premised on Kant's supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field. This study reveals the extraordinary historical self-consciousness of the civil philosophers, who repudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual formation of those administering desacralized territorial states. The book argues that the marginalization of civil philosophy in post-Kantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuation of the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combining careful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic, Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and historians alike.
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 text, Ian Hunter departs from the usual view of Thomasius as a natural law moral philosopher. In addition to investigating his anti-scholastic cultural politics, Hunter discusses Thomasius' work in public and church law, particularly his disputations arguing for the toleration of heretics, providing a revealing comparison with Locke's arguments on the same topic. If Locke sought to base toleration in the subjective rights protecting Christian citizens against an intolerant state, Thomasius grounded it in the state's duty to impose toleration as an obligation on intolerant citizens.
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, thereby challenging all histories premised on Kant's supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field. This study reveals the extraordinary historical self-consciousness of the civil philosophers, who repudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual formation of those administering desacralized territorial states. The book argues that the marginalization of civil philosophy in post-Kantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuation of the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combining careful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic, Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and historians alike.
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 text, Ian Hunter departs from the usual view of Thomasius as a natural law moral philosopher. In addition to investigating his anti-scholastic cultural politics, Hunter discusses Thomasius' work in public and church law, particularly his disputations arguing for the toleration of heretics, providing a revealing comparison with Locke's arguments on the same topic. If Locke sought to base toleration in the subjective rights protecting Christian citizens against an intolerant state, Thomasius grounded it in the state's duty to impose toleration as an obligation on intolerant citizens.
A historical inquiry into Kantian philosophy as a form of philosophical religionKantian philosophy is typically viewed as providing a universal theory of knowledge and morality based on timeless principles retrieved from the human mind. In The Kantian Religion, Ian Hunter offers a starkly different account. Hunter contends that Kant’s arguments were assembled from purely historical sources and served as ascetic devices for crafting the towering self of the Kantian philosopher; they were exercises in intellectual self-clarification and moral transformation undertaken by a cohort of the philosophically educated in search of spiritual clarity and moral purity. These “solemn rites of the mind” were seen as heir and rival to the regenerative resources and cultural importance of the Christian religion, and Kantianism was characterized as a philosophical religion.Hunter describes the ways that elite spiritual athletes performed a series of philosophically strenuous “acts of the self on the self” through Kant’s intellectual exercises. When Kantianism emerged as an insurgent cultural movement in the 1780s, it offered young academics training to be clergy and teachers a philosophy that was powerful enough to supplant Christian spirituality and to subordinate humanist scholarship and the natural sciences to philosophical self-reflection. For Kant and his followers, the religious disposition of Kantian philosophy came solely from the immanent practice of the philosophy itself. As a rival to conventional religion and as an academic interloper, Kantian philosophy unleashed a wave of conflicts in Germany’s ecclesiastical and scholarly cultures. Although recent Kant commentary typically views Kantianism as intrinsically secular and scientific, Hunter argues provocatively that Kant’s contemporaries viewed his philosophy as an extra-ecclesiastical path to spiritual refinement and moral regeneration.
Microwave filters are vital components in a huge variety of electronic systems, including the rapidly growing communications industry behind mobile radio and satellite communications, as well as radar and other microwave technologies. Ian Hunter provides a graduate-level text that has the aim of enabling the engineer to understand the theory and design of microwave filters. This book is extremely thorough and covers fundamental circuit theory and electromagnetics, network synthesis, applications and the design of a variety of real microwave structures, all in a single source. The philosophy is to present design theories followed by specific examples with numerical simulations of the designs, accompanied by pictures of real devices wherever possible. The intended primary readership is professional engineers in the communications and microwave industries, where the book will be suitable for recent graduates working with and designing filters for the first time, through to engineering managers responsible for RF system design. MSc students in microwave and RF engineering will find the book highly relevant, as the author has developed much of the material from his graduate-level courses for university and industry. Theory and Design of Microwave Filters will also be a valuable reference work in the research community.
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) fulfilment of this promise in the education system. This book presents a sustained and historically informed challenge to that view.
After the murder of his best friend and the implosion of his band, Sebastian Eliot has left small town England on a quest to reinvent himself. It's 1995 and London is once more the eye of the musical hurricane. The Britpop phenomenon is about to explode across the globe, and in Camden Town every night is Friday night. Sebastian Eliot can be anyone he wants to be, but it's not long before his dreams of pop stardom see him sucked into a dark world where no one is quite who they seem. The same is true of Sebastian Eliot. He doesn't really exist.
Ian Hunter's Diary of a Rock `n' Roll Star, first published in 1974, is a fascinating diary of Mott the Hoople's 1972 US tour. It has received a litany of plaudits and been described as what "may well be the best rock book ever" and "an enduring crystallization of the rock musician's lot, and a quietly glorious period piece" from Q and The Guardian. A brutally honest chronicle of touring life in the Seventies, and a classic of the rock writing genre, Diary of a Rock `n' Roll Star remains the gold standard for rock writing. This new edition includes new content from Hunter. Ian Hunter is the lead singer in Mott the Hoople and a successful solo artist in his own right. He continues to record and perform across the world after more than fifty years in rock'n'roll.
