Henry E. Allison

Henry Edward Allison (April 25, 1937 – June 5, 2023) was an American scholar of Immanuel Kant, widely considered to be one of the most eminent English-language Kant scholars of the postwar era. He was a professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of California, San Diego and a professor at Boston University.

Life and career

Allison graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Philosophy in 1959. He wanted to work on philosophy of religion, and so he enrolled at Columbia University; it had a joint master's program with Union Theological Seminary (New York). He received his M.A. in 1961. He then entered the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Columbia. However, he signed up for a course on the Critique of Pure Reason taught by Aron Gurwitsch at the New School for Social Research. As a result, "I did decide to transfer to the New School and work with Gurwitsch." He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the New School for Social research in 1964 with a dissertation on Lessing written under the direction of Gurwitsch. After teaching at the State University of New York at Potsdam, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Florida, he taught from 1973 until 1996 at the University of California, San Diego, where an endowed chair was named in his honor. After a visiting appointment as the John Findlay Visiting Professor in 1995, he joined the faculty at Boston University in 1996, remaining until 2004.