Kwame Anthony Appiah

Ancestry

Appiah's mother's family has a long political tradition: Sir Stafford was a nephew of Beatrice Webb and was Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer (1947–1950) under Clement Attlee; his father, Charles Cripps, was Labour Leader of the House of Lords (1929–31), as Lord Parmoor in Ramsay MacDonald's government; Parmoor had been a Conservative MP before defecting to Labour. Through his grandmother Isobel Cripps, Appiah is a descendant of the British pharmacist James Crossley Eno.

Through Appiah's father, a Nana of the Ashanti people, he is a direct descendant of Osei Tutu, the warrior emperor of pre-colonial Ghana, whose reigning successor, the Asantehene, is a distant relative of the Appiah family. Also among his African ancestors is the Ashanti nobleman Nana Akroma-Ampim I of Nyaduom, a warrior after whom Appiah was named.

Personal life

He lives with his husband, Henry Finder, an editorial director of The New Yorker, in an apartment in Manhattan, and a home in Pennington, New Jersey with a small sheep farm.

Appiah became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1997. The actor Adetomiwa Edun is one of his nephews, the son of his sister Amy Appiah.

Career

Appiah taught philosophy and African-American studies at the University of Ghana, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities from 1981 to 1988. Until 2014, he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton (with a cross-appointment at the University Center for Human Values) and also was the Bacon-Kilkenny Professor of Law at Fordham University in the fall of 2008. Appiah also served on the board of PEN American Center and was on a panel of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award. He has lectured at many other institutions in the US, Germany, Ghana and South Africa, and Paris. Until the fall of 2009, he served as a trustee of Ashesi University College in Accra, Ghana. Since 2014, he has been a professor of philosophy and law at NYU.

His Cambridge dissertation explored the foundations of probabilistic semantics. In 1992, Appiah published In My Father's House, which won the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English. Among his later books are Colour Conscious (with Amy Gutmann), The Ethics of Identity (2005), and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). He has been a close collaborator with Henry Louis Gates Jr., with whom he edited Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. Appiah was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995.

In 2008, Appiah published Experiments in Ethics, in which he reviews the relevance of empirical research to ethical theory. In the same year, he was recognised for his contributions to racial, ethnic, and religious relations when Brandeis University awarded him the first Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize.

As well as his academic work, Appiah has also published several works of fiction. His first novel, Avenging Angel, set at the University of Cambridge, involved a murder among the Cambridge Apostles; Sir Patrick Scott is the detective in the novel. Appiah's second and third novels are Nobody Likes Letitia and Another Death in Venice.

Appiah has been nominated for, or received, several honours. He was the 2009 finalist in the arts and humanities for the Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine on its list of top global thinkers. On 13 February 2012, Appiah was awarded the National Humanities Medal at a ceremony at the White House.

Appiah currently chairs the jury for the Berggruen Prize, and serves on the Berggruen Institute's Philosophy & Culture Center's Academic Board. He was elected as President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2022.

Ideas

Appiah's early philosophical work dealt with probabilistic semantics and theories of meaning, but his more recent books have tackled philosophical problems of race and racism, identity, and moral theory. His current work tackles three major areas: 1. the philosophical foundations of liberalism; 2. the questioning of methods in arriving at knowledge about values; and 3. the connections between theory and practice in moral life, all of which concepts can also be found in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.

On postmodern culture, Appiah writes, "Postmodern culture is the culture in which all postmodernisms operate, sometimes in synergy, sometimes in competition; and because contemporary culture is, in a certain sense to which I shall return, transnational, postmodern culture is global – though that emphatically does not mean that it is the culture of every person in the world."

Cosmopolitanism

Appiah has been influenced by the cosmopolitan philosophical tradition, which stretches from Greek thinkers such as Diogenes to African American thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. In his article "Education for Global Citizenship", Appiah outlines his conception of cosmopolitanism. He therein defines cosmopolitanism as "universality plus difference". Building from this definition, he asserts that the first takes precedence over the latter, that is: different cultures are respected "not because cultures matter in themselves, but because people matter, and culture matters to people." Accordingly, cultural differences are to be respected in so far as they are not harmful to people and in no way conflict with our universal concern for every human's life and well-being.

In his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), Appiah introduces two ideas that "intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism" (Emerging, 69). The first is the idea that we have obligations to others that are bigger than just sharing citizenship. The second idea is that we should never take for granted the value of life and become informed of the practices and beliefs of others. Kwame Appiah frequents university campuses to speak to students. One request he makes is, "See one movie with subtitles a month."

In Lies that Bind (2018), Appiah attempts to deconstruct identities of creed, colour, country, and class.

Criticism of Afrocentric world view

Appiah has been a critic of contemporary theories of Afrocentrism. In his 1997 essay "Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism", he argues that current Afrocentricism is striking for "how thoroughly at home it is in the frameworks of nineteenth century European thought", particularly as a mirror image to Eurocentric constructions of race and a preoccupation with the ancient world. Appiah also finds an irony in the conception that if the source of the West lies in ancient Egypt via Greece, then "its legacy of ethnocentrism is presumably one of our moral liabilities."

In popular culture

• In 2007, Appiah was a contributing scholar in the PBS-broadcast documentary Prince Among Slaves, produced by Unity Productions Foundation.
• In 2007, he also appeared in the TV documentary series Racism: A History as an on-screen contributor.
• Appiah appeared alongside a number of contemporary philosophers in Astra Taylor's 2008 film Examined Life, discussing his views on cosmopolitanism.
• In 2009, he was an on-screen contributor to the movie Herskovits: At the Heart of Blackness.
• In 2015, he became one of three contributors to the New York Times Magazine column "The Ethicist", before assuming sole authorship of the column later that year.
• Appiah delivered the BBC's Reith Lectures in late 2016 on the theme of Mistaken Identities.
• In late 2016, Appiah contended that Western civilization did not exist, and argued that many ostensibly unique Western attributes and values were instead shared among many "non-western" cultures and/or eras.
• In 2018, Appiah appeared in the episode "Can We Live Forever?" of the documentary series Explained.