‘Like many, I was saddened to hear of Henry Allison's passing. I was lucky to have been one of his students, near the end of his tenure at Boston University. In fact, Henry's seminar on the Critique of Pure Reason was the reason why I turned from working on Kant's political thought to working on his theoretical philosophy for my PhD.
Henry's course on the first Critique was a year long with the first half on the "agony of the Analytic" and the second exploring the "delights of the Dialectic" (as he put it). The course itself was an experience. Each meeting he required a short exposition (of no more than 350 words) on a chapter of the CPR , an exercise that encouraged close attention to Kant's text and discouraged the sort of verbosity and throwing about of Kantian vocabulary so prevalent in Kant-scholarship still. Upon receiving the assignments at the beginning of the class, he would pick one to read and then comment on it in a fair bit of detail, and in all but the most exceptional cases this was a thoroughly humbling process for the chosen author. Indeed, it was not an exercise that everyone enjoyed. The year I took the seminar, the first half counted around 20 enrolled participants but for the second half only I remained enrolled (along with a couple of auditors). I was delighted by this, of course, as it meant that I would gain more of Henry's attention for my research, but Henry was understandably mortified that so few had continued (and it apparently stuck with him as he reminded me of this circumstance some years later).
Henry was leaving BU as I returned from a DAAD fellowship in Cologne in 2004, but, despite owing nothing to me (I was officially a student at nearby Boston College), he agreed to meet to discuss my thesis proposal in detail before his departure. His detailed, handwritten comments were fairly withering. They begin with "The fault may be mine but if I have understood you correctly..." and proceed to show that he had understood me perfectly well and that the fault lay entirely with me. I have kept these comments tacked to the wall near my desk in my office ever since, just to look at whenever I start to feel a bit too big for my britches. Henry's standards were very high, but if you met them you knew you were in good shape (and the final paper I submitted for his course was accepted for publication in Kant-Studien soon after).
Manfred Kuehn was Henry's successor at BU. I thought this was fortuitous for me at the time, as Manfred encouraged my contextualizing mania where Henry had been fairly dismissive of it. But since then I have come to appreciate Henry's many and profound contributions to historical scholarship in philosophy. His dissertation on Lessing (yes, that Lessing) at the New School (yes, that New School) is still cited by Lessing scholars (particularly his conjecture that Lessing had found Leibniz's Nouveaux essais while he was the librarian at Wolfenbuettel), and his more recent scholarship evidenced a renewed appreciation for the figures and debates that make up the context of Kant's philosophy. One of the last times I saw him in person was at a conference on Baumgarten, of all things. Indeed, one might draw a direct line from Henry's early work on Lessing (who was the occasion of the Pantheismusstreit), through his subsequent work on Spinoza (and the psycho-physical parallelism of IIp7 in the Ethics), to his famous interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism.
In the end, what I valued most of what I learned from Henry was his approach to Kant. Against a tendency in historical scholarship to treat a philosophical text as a kind of sparring partner, Henry emphasized an approach that was charitable--seeking to understand the text in its own terms and independently of however it might compare to the latter-day philosophical flavour of the month--without dogmatically presuming the correctness of the view (though some might justifiably disagree on this). I've applied Henry's approach in my reading of historical philosophical texts more generally, and it has opened my eyes to philosophical figures and even whole traditions that have been hastily consigned to the dustbin of history because someone (ironically, usually Kant, or one of his disciples) dismissed it before seeking to understand it. Henry may not have been everyone's idea of a model teacher, but for me he remains a model scholar, not just for Kant, but for the entire history of modern philosophy. He will be missed.
--Corey W. Dyck
This memoir appeared originally in a slightly longer form on Corey Dyck’s Facebook page. Corey is the journal’s Book Review Editor. A longer obituary will appear in our final issue of this year, written by Luigi Caranti who was a doctoral student with Henry Allison.