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Professor Allen, who was one of Richard Rorty’s best-known students, was Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, where he spent most of his career. He wrote widely in epistemology, aesthetics, and on pragmatism. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Allen or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.
Barry and I were both undergraduates at the University of Lethbridge. He was a little ahead of me and I missed meeting him then (although given the size of the town, I must have passed him on the street countless times). But the Lethbridge connection held and he was very kind to me when he was a graduate student and Princeton and I was trying to find my way at Columbia.
Very sad news.
I was Barry Allen’s Teaching Assistant for a few years at McMaster nearly 20 years ago. He was such a powerful lecturer that I still think about him when I plan my own teaching and courses. With his passing, the profession has lost an inspirational voice. Devastating news.
I have only ever taken one class on aesthetics, but it was taught by the best lecturer I have ever heard. Barry Allen would read his lectures and they would read almost like stories. His tests were multiple choice, but I don’t remember taking harder tests during my undergrad. Most of all, though, I remember that Barry Allen was kind. I count myself fortunate to have been his student.
Sorry to hear this news. I was an undergraduate in philosophy at McMaster back in the 1990s and was fortunate to have Allen as an instructor. He was a brilliant teacher. Each class I was mesmerized by his enthusiasm for the subject. He had a knack for presenting the material as a compelling story, while also conveying copious amounts of detail (not an easy feat). The memory that sticks in my mind the most was my lamenting the existence of god while waiting for the bus home after his night class lecture on Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hard to believe it was more than 30 years ago. Allen was the kind of instructor a student never forgets.
I had the privilege of TA’ing for Barry Allen a half dozen times between 2006 and 2012, and I also took his graduate seminar on Deleuze, which he framed as “a fishing expedition.” Aloof but with a dry, droll humor, Barry was an incredible lecturer who could flip a switch and speak extemporaneously in a way that was both analytical and almost synesthetic. He had a gift for widening the philosophical frame while zeroing in on striking examples. In Philosophical Psychology, for instance, we read La Mettrie, d’Holbach, and Thomas Huxley alongside more familiar figures, and talked in depth about evo-devo.
I remember us walking back from Aesthetics to University Hall one term, when the course focused on bridges as he was finishing Artifice and Design (Cornell UP, 2008). I mentioned growing up near the Ambassador Bridge, and he casually knew more about its construction and cultural significance than a good Wikipedia article. But he seemed to know something about everything, and had informed opinions about which tools were useful for which work. He had a sharp eye for builders of Procrustean beds and more than once remarked that “reality is more fuzzed up than that.”
For a while he seemed always to carry a paperback copy of either The Portable Freud or Lacan’s Écrits to class, but he was cagey when I tried to ask blunt questions about his view of psychoanalysis. Barry was open-minded without being a sieve — a thinker who, in every sense, built bridges. He will be missed.
Oh such sad news. Barry was brilliant, and kind. He will be greatly missed by all those who called him friend.
Barry Allen was my professor in two classes. He genuinely changed my perspective on life. He was always the most inspiring person I knew. I remember going to his office hours to chat about philosophy and he had told me that he initially did not care for academics until he took a philosophy class. He is an amazing person, may he rest in peace.
Sincerely, Your Student Ramneek
Barry Allen was a true philosophy Zaddy
“…it is life, more than death, that has no limits.” — Gabriel García Márquez
The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry:
Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life
Barry Allen dedicated his life to philosophy. He was a was a passionate teacher, a committed colleague, and an exceptional scholar. His students adored his enthusiasm for philosophizing and some of them called him respectfully the “sage of Hamilton.” Such was the impact his intellectual personality had on them. A quiet person, Barry came to life when he entered a classroom, and students frequently described his lectures as electrifying and inspiring. Inviting them to participate in his own philosophical endeavors, he taught his students to approach all philosophical issues with intellectual integrity—from the basic questions of philosophy to the intricacies of teleological thinking in the history of philosophy. His intellectual honesty, humility, and dedication gave the philosophical topics he lectured on a sense of urgency and real stakes. Barry was also a popular supervisor, helping several generations of graduate students to work on highly original topics. Leading by example, he took full responsibility for their intellectual development, which he felt should manifest in a thesis characterized by philosophical depth and lucid exposition. Barry usually succeeded in bringing out the best in his many graduate students.
Uninterested in the vanity aspects of academia, Barry always followed his own mind, ignoring the intellectual fashions which come and go. He started his philosophical career with a PhD at Princeton University, writing his thesis on the canonical philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein under the supervision of Richard Rorty (Criteria and Intentionality: Studies in Wittgenstein, Dissertation, Princeton University, 1986). His subsequent research was rooted in the European tradition of continental thought, yet he had little patience for the supposed divide between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy which shaped the Anglo-American discourse during most of his lifetime, preferring to chart his own path. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of philosophy and drew inspiration from many different thinkers, intellectual traditions and cultures.
Barry’s range was tremendous. In his first of his seven books, Truth in Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1993), he attributes the correspondence theory of truth and its positive valuation to the Western philosophical tradition, and he calls both of these presuppositions into question. He argues that the truth of a belief is not aptly characterized in terms of its correspondence to an external reality. Rather, as Barry puts it, “We admire and evaluate as true those beliefs which enlarge predictability and facilitate action by increasing its control.” (3) Barry further argues that one cannot disturb the correspondence theory of truth in this way without thereby raising urgent ethical and political questions concerning the use and pursuit of truth. This reconceptualization of truth and its value led Barry to the iconoclastic account of knowledge defended in his second book, Knowledge and Civilization (Routledge, 2004). There, Barry repositions knowledge as practical value tied to human technological accomplishments—surgery, dam construction, space exploration—and he argues that “the good of knowledge, what makes it preferable to error or ignorance, is superlative artifactual performance.” (4) His overarching claim is that the Western tradition’s focus on propositional knowledge has resulted in a failure to appreciate and understand knowledge in its most important and dynamic form—know how as opposed to knowledge that. Barry’s brilliant analysis of the emergence of civilization not only displays a complete mastery of the literature of Darwinian evolutionary and anthropology, it also offers stunning insights into the history of tool-making, puncturing conceits about what in fact constitutes a tool. With his third book, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (Cornell University Press, 2008), Barry established himself as a leading philosopher of technology. In this work, he opposes the contemplative conception of knowledge initiated by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and he defends the bold thesis that knowledge is artifactual. Knowing that something is the case (propositionally) is a by-product or “spandrel” of human evolution, not the progenitor of civilization. For him, knowledge as know-how is congealed and made manifest in the artifact.
Barry’s research was prodigious, eclectic, and expansive. So, his contributions cannot be easily summarized. That said, one might plausibly argue the conceptions of truth and knowledge set out in his first three books comprise a unifying throughline. The defense and exploration of these conceptions drove him to a wide array of philosophical traditions and thinkers, from the European tradition of continental thought (prominently including Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault, and Deleuze), to the American pragmatic tradition revolving around Peirce and James, to non-Western philosophical traditions. For instance, he spent considerable time in China and seriously engaged with Chinese philosophy, leading to his fourth and fifth books, Vanishing Into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2015) and Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts (Columbia University Press, 2015), both of which demonstrate his commitment to understanding knowledge from cross-cultural perspectives. Barry’s sixth book, Empiricisms: Experience and Experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene (Oxford University Press, 2020) explicates and traces the intellectual history of two forms of empiricism. He associates the first form of empiricism, theorematic empiricism, with figures from the early analytic tradition, such as Carnap and Russell. As he describes it, the theorematic empiricist assumes that knowledge is derived from sensory experience and that it is given and directly known. By contrast, problematic or radical empiricism, focuses on the process of experimentation as a method for solving practical conundrums and raising new questions about how to engage with, predict, and control the natural world. Barry’s seventh and final published book, Living in Time: The Philosophy of Henri Bergson (Oxford University Press, 2023) defends Bergson’s notion of time against scientific reductionism and frames him as a radical empiricist who argues that time is fundamentally lived rather than simply measured.
Barry’s last years were dedicated to Truth and Reconciliation by examining the special character of Indigenous thought—an issue which he experienced as deeply personal. His recently published paper on “Indigenous Epistemologies of North America” (Episteme, 2023) contrasts traditional forms of embedded knowledge meant to sustain a concrete community with the European approach of perfecting knowledge as science by introducing abstract principles, pointing to epistemic decolonialization as a relational problem. Barry’s last major research project culminated in a nearly finished book project about Indigenous knowledge systems that is expected to be published posthumously.
In Barry Allen, McMaster has lost a world-renowned scholar, as recognized by his rank as a Distinguished University Professor and his inclusion in Canada’s Royal Society of Fellows. His scholarship was truly sui generis and inspired generations of students. He blazed his own philosophical trail, and more pointedly, his work consistently challenged and sought to revise longstanding central philosophical presuppositions. Barry believed in the need for rigorous argumentation but also rejected the reduction of philosophy to logical games and ever smaller contributions to the arcane debates of experts. His sincere dedication to philosophy as something that truly matters, coupled with his ability to think beyond the accepted boundaries of current academic philosophy, made him a unique voice and drew generations of students to him. Barry was truly one of a kind. To him, Nietzsche’s picture of the place of knowledge as “my own territory, my own soil, a whole silently growing and blossoming world” (Genealogy of Morality, Preface 3) truly applies. He is much missed.
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