Mac professor awarded fellowship

By: Elizabeth Saucier

Earlier this month, Prof. Barry Allen of the philosophy department was rewarded a fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada. This prestigious national institution, established by parliament in 1883, aims to recognize outstanding scholarship and foster research and study.

Allen was nominated for his work on the nature of knowledge and aesthetics, as well as his efforts to connect the sometimes disparate worlds of Asian and occidental philosophy.

“I’m very grateful that my work has been recognized in this way. My work is not very conventional at all. It’s very gratifying to find that a body of academic peers are willing to find something of value in the work that I’ve been doing,” remarked Allen.

Allen recalls his experiences presenting his doctoral thesis at Princeton: “I caused a bit of a scandal in my own department because my department was one of the most trenchantly analytic departments that really had just no interest in continental philosophy... and didn’t really want to have anything to do with it. And I composed a dissertation that was right in the middle of continental philosophy and it caused a lot of consternation.”

Allen has never shied away from blazing a trail. His favourite aspect of teaching at McMaster specifically is the freedom the university gives him to create his own courses and curricula. Allen introduced a course on Chinese philosophy, a topic that had not been covered at McMaster in previous years.

“I like having the opportunity to make undergraduate students feel excited about philosophy. Many students have no real clue about what it is. I enjoyed being able to show them that this is an exciting thing. I hope that they might have memories of it for a long time,” he said.

Although Allen enjoys supervising graduate students who wish to explore topics in continental philosophy, aesthetics, and environmental philosophy, he relishes the opportunity to reach undergraduates, particularly those not focused on philosophy.

“Students discover things they had no idea existed, and find them fascinating.” Allen is motivated by his ability to introduce students to diverse topics and viewpoints of which they may have had no prior knowledge.

Finally, when asked, “What do you wish more students knew?” he had a few parting thoughts.

“[I wish they had] a little bit more history and a little bit more sense of the way the world works. A little bit more awareness that the way things are now is not the way it always was. Change can produce extraordinary differences that no one could have seen coming. When I teach I try to have a historical component. I teach them philosophy not just as a bunch of arguments and ideas. I teach them that a lot of things that seem obvious to them were not obvious to people in historical times. I hope that shakes them from the dangers of complacency, and alerts them that there may be a whole world they haven’t begun to guess, yet to be explored and discovered.”