Henry Edward Allison (born April 25, 1937) is a scholar of

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...

, widely considered to be one of the most eminent English-language Kant scholars of the postwar era. He is Emeritus Professor at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...

and

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with ...

Education and career

Allison 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

Aron Gurwitsch Aron Gurwitsch (russian: Аро́н Гу́рвич; 17 January 1901, Vilnius, Vilna Governorate – 25 June 1973, Zurich) was a Litvak American phenomenologist. Work Gurwitsch wrote on the relations between phenomenology and Gestalt psycholog ...

. He taught from 1973 until 1997 at the

, where an endowed chair was named in his honor. He joined the faculty at

in 1997. He is a fellow of the

Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters ( no, Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi, DNVA) is a learned society based in Oslo, Norway. Its purpose is to support the advancement of science and scholarship in Norway. History The Royal Frederick Unive ...

from 1996.

Philosophical work

His interests are

, Baruch Spinoza,

German idealism German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary ...

18th 18 (eighteen) is the natural number following 17 and preceding 19. In mathematics * Eighteen is a composite number, its divisors being 1, 2, 3, 6 and 9. Three of these divisors (3, 6 and 9) add up to 18, hence 18 is a semiperfect number. ...

and

19th century philosophy In the 19th century, the philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment began to have a dramatic effect on subsequent developments in philosophy. In particular, the works of Immanuel Kant gave rise to a new generation of German philosophers and ...

. Allison is perhaps best known for his 1983 book, ''Kant's Transcendental Idealism'', which proposed a new "epistemological" reading of the '' Critique of Pure Reason'' that was both radically different from standard interpretations and offered responses to many of the objections advanced by philosophers like

Paul Guyer Paul Guyer () is an American philosopher and a leading scholar of Immanuel Kant and of aesthetics. Since 2012, he has been Jonathan Nelson Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Brown University. Education and career Guyer grew up on Long Is ...

. The "two aspects' reading "interprets

transcendental idealism Transcendental idealism is a philosophical system founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's epistemological program is found throughout his '' Critique of Pure Reason'' (1781). By ''transcendental'' (a term that dese ...

as a fundamentally epistemological theory that distinguishes between two standpoints on the objects of experience: the human standpoint, from which objects are viewed relative to epistemic conditions that are peculiar to human cognitive faculties (namely, the a priori forms of our sensible intuition); and the standpoint of an intuitive intellect, from which the same objects could be known in themselves and independently of any epistemic conditions."

References

1937 births Living people American philosophers Kant scholars Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters {{US-philosopher-stub

Education and career

Philosophical work

See also

References