Robert Allinson studied with Charles Hartshorne, heralded by the Encyclopedia Britannica as the leading metaphysician of the twentieth century, who became the co-director of his doctoral dissertation together with the distinguished Indian novelist, Raja Rao, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s highest literary award, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His Doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin was a set of original dialogues between East and West. He earned the Highest Distinction in Metaphysics and Epistemology, graded by John Findlay and Charles Hartshorne. He was awarded an Oldright Fellowship, one of only two granted. He studied with the Kant scholar, John Silber, the Plato scholar, Alexander Mourelatos, the Hegelian scholars, John Findlay and Errol Harris, and the English translator of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Edward Robinson. He was Teaching Assistant to Marjorie Grene, who studied with Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Since Charles Hartshorne had been a student of Lord Alfred North Whitehead and Edmund Husserl, Professor Allinson’s educational heritage can be traced back to Husserl, a philosopher whose writings came to influence Professor Allinson’s thinking about Metaphysics. He studied Spinoza, Leibniz, Whitehead and Methods in Metaphysics with Hartshorne. In addition, he studied with Mihoko Nakamura, the private secretary of Daisetz Suzuki in Japan, Reverend Yen Why, the student of the last surviving Ch’ an Buddhist Master from China, Empty Clouds in Hong Kong and Sri Padmanabha Menon, son of Krishna Menon, in Anandavadi, India. He was invited to participate in the Zen Symposium in Kyoto with Nishitani Keiji. He has published on Zen Buddhism in The Eastern Buddhist founded by D. T. Suzuki and on Buddhist economics.
Robert Allinson’s academic career has included being the Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and offered a Full Professorship at West Virginia State University, one of the top five of HBUC, integrated in reverse. He served for twenty-seven years on the Graduate Panel of the Department of Philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, achieving the rank of Full Professor. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of Shaw College of The Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Fellow to Shaw College. He has served as External Examiner both to major Research Universities and for promotions for candidates from Full Professor to Distinguished Professor at major Research Universities. He is now Professor of Philosophy at Soka University of America and Affiliate Faculty to the University of Haifa. He regularly offers seminars on Metaphysics, the Holocaust, courses in east–west philosophy, and courses in Corporate Social Responsibility and Good Governance and Environmental and BioEthics. He presented a paper on Medical Ethics for the Stanford University Medical School.
Robert Allinson has long been a supporter of the idea that Philosophy is universal. He has recently served as the Guest Editor for a trilogy of issues of nearly 900 pages on whether we need a new Enlightenment for the 21st century. He referees regularly for Diametros, Philosophy East and West, Asian Philosophy, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, as well as a select number of international journals. He is or has been a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Asian Philosophy, the Editorial Board for Bloomsbury Academic Publishers Series, Daoism and Human Experience, Business Ethics Quarterly, and Philosophical Inquiry.
He is also a published poet and has published his poetry in poetry magazines on adjoining pages with Boris Pasternak (Nobel laureate for literature) and Odysseus Elytis (Nobel laureate for literature). He is a winner of an Academy of American Poets Award judged by Octavio Paz (Nobel laureate for literature).
