Mar 16 2011
Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah
Cultural Theorist, Novelist & One of the Most Relevant Philosophers Today
Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of America’s leading public intellectuals and an eminent philosopher. A renowned philosopher known for forging a code of ethics to fit a globalized world, he was once described as “our postmodern Socrates”. He has spent the last decade thinking about what it takes to turn moral understanding into moral behaviour. He challenges us to look beyond the boundaries — real and imagined — that divide us, and to see our common humanity. He is the Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and the President of the PEN American Center, the internationally acclaimed literary and human rights association.
“In fitting abstract concepts to the changing demands of the modern world, he is trying to make philosophy relevant again”
Kwame Anthony Appiah was educated at Cambridge University, where he received a Ph.D. in philosophy. As a scholar of African and African-American studies, he established himself as an intellectual with a broad reach and has now taught philosophy on three continents, having taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at many other institutions in the US, Germany, Ghana and South Africa, and Paris. In 2008, he was recognized for his contributions to racial, ethnic, and religious relations when Brandeis University awarded him the first Joseph B. and Toby Glitter Prize.[/expand]
In his acerbic presentations, Kwame Anthony Appiah explores some of the central ethical questions of our time. Named by Foreign Policy magazine to its 2010 list of top global thinkers, he offers answers that are grounded in a new ethics (Cosmopolitanism) which celebrates our common humanity, while at the same time offering a practical way to manage our differences. He lays out a concept that is, not only compelling in its own right, but also suggests a connection that may in time help to collate biological and cultural exploration of human morality.[/expand]
With wit, reason and humanity, Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a new approach to living a moral life in the modern age, often achieving a Malcolm Gladwell-like balance between argument and storytelling. With fluency of argument and erudition, he asks profound questions about identity and ethics in a world where the sands of race, ethnicity, religion and nationalism continue to realign and reform before our eyes.[/expand]
Watch a video presentation of Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah
Topics
The Honour Code: Making Moral Revolutions
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
Political and Moral Theory
Philosophy of Language and Mind
African Intellectual History
Publications
2010
The Honor Code (One of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 notable books of 2010. Also a Times Literary Supplement 2010 Book of the Year, and a Best Book for Christmas 2010 in The Independent)
Experiments in Ethics
2007
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time) (with Henry Louis Gates Jr.)
The Ethics of Identity
2003
Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy
1998
Color Conscious (with Amy Gutmann & David B. Wilkins)
1993
In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
1991
Avenging Angel
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