Rex Butler, Spiritual Exercises in Kantian Philosophy: An Interview with Ian Hunter, Journal of the History of Ideas blog, 17 August 2026
Ian Hunter is an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is an intellectual historian who has published various studies in the history of philosophical, political, legal, and theological thought. These studies treat thought as a concrete activity that is carried out within historical time through “arts and methods” and anchored in various “intellectual personae.” His first major work of this kind was Rival Enlightenments, published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. His most recent work and the topic of the present discussion is The Kantian Religion, an historical account of Kantianism as a philosophical religion published by Princeton University Press in 2026. For the JHI Blog, he discussed his latest work with Rex Butler, a Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University who writes on critical theory and Australian art.
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Ian Hunter: I had already drawn on Foucault’s discussion of spirituality and its relation to philosophy in earlier works. Foucault treats spirituality as the carrying out of certain “acts of the self on the self” that are designed to shape a subject capable of higher forms of insight, including philosophical insight. This was an approach that he shared with his one-time Berkeley colleague, the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown, from whose studies of philosophical asceticism I have also learned so much. Fraenkel’s and Hadot’s work has been less important for my investigations, since the former thinks that Neoplatonic philosophy functions as a true religion, while the latter argues that ancient philosophy’s role as a way of life was transferred to Christianity, leaving modern philosophy to emerge as an abstract method. In characterizing Kantianism as a philosophical religion, my aim is more straightforwardly historical: to delineate a series of features that permit the empirical question of its religious disposition to be posed.
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