Kwame Appiah
From Philosopedia
Appiah, Kwame Anthony (8 May 1954 - )
Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampin Kusi Appiah was born in London (where his Ghanaian father was a law student) but moved as an infant to Kumasi, Ghana, where he grew up. His mother, Peggy (1921-2006), was a children's book author and the daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps (1889-1951), a Labor party leader and cabinet officer in the Clement Attlee government (1947-1950). Sir Stafford's father was Charles Cripps, 1st Baron Parmoor, the Labour Leader of the House of Lords (1929-1931) under Ramsay MacDonald - Parmoor had been a Conservative MP before defecting to Labour. Kwame's father, Joseph Emmanuel Appiah, was a Ghanaian lawyer and politician.
Appiah was educated at Cambridge University in England, where he took both B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy. His dissertation explored the foundations of probabilistic semantics; once revised, these arguments were published by Cambridge University Press as Assertion and Conditionals. Out of that first monograph grew a second book, For Truth in Semantics, which dealt with Michael Dummett’s defenses of semantic anti-realism.
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Teaching
Since Cambridge, he has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at many other institutions in the United States, Germany, Ghana, and South Africa, as well as at the école des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Since 2002, he has been Professor of Philosophy at Princeton (with a cross-appointment at the University Center for Human Values).
Works
Professor Appiah has also published widely in African and African-American literary and cultural studies. In 1992, Oxford University Press published In My Father's House, which won the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English. It deals, in part, with the role of African and African-American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. He makes the case for
- a vigorous defense of a multicultural approach to philosophy. . . .[There] is no reason to deny other cultures in the world an equal right to develop their own ways of doing and expressing their ideas about what philosophy is and should be.
In 1996, he published Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race with Amy Gutmann.
In 1997 the co-edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr. Dictionary of Global Culture. Along with Professor Gates he has also edited the Encarta Africana CD-ROM encyclopedia, published by Microsoft, which became the Perseus Africana encyclopedia in book form. Whereas E. D. Hirsch Jr. and his fellow editors in their Dictionary of Cultural Literacy had emphasized terms common in Western culture, Appiah and Gates emphasized the achievement of the non-Western world. By the year 2000, they note, half the world’s people will be Asian and one-eighth will be African. A majority will be non-Christian. Of the world’s twenty largest cities, none will be in Europe nor in the United States. The Economist (15 March 1997) was highly critical:
- The omissions are peculiar. V. S. Naipaul is not listed, either as a British or as a Trinidadian author. Nor, among African writers, are Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. There are entries for lots of West African people - Mossi, Bambara, Baulé (whose culture, we are told, "is re-emerging") - but none for Caucasian tribes such as Georgians, Abkhaz, Mingrelians. The Watusi do not make it, either as perpetrators or as victims of genocide - or as the originators of a one-time American dance craze. . . . As a canon-buster, then, this book is a bit of a failure. Perhaps Messrs. Appiah and Gates were too busy to find time for the lexicographer's harmless drudgery. Their non-delivery of what they promises is a let-down for them, their university and - what matters more - their students.
In 2003, he coauthored Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (of which his mother is the major author), an annotated edition of 7,500 proverbs in Twi, the language of Asante. He is also the author of three novels, of which the first, Avenging Angel, was largely set at Clare College, Cambridge. In 2004, Oxford University Press published his introduction to contemporary philosophy entitled Thinking It Through.
In 2005, his Ethics and Identity (Princeton) focuses on the ethical question ("What should I make of my life?") rather than the moral question ("What are the proper functions of the liberal state?" For Appiah, who is openly gay, we all need a sense of who we are, what we think, hope, admire and detest, and this is what it is to have identity. Like John Stuart Mill, who admitted Harriet Taylor's influence in her role of steadying his thinking and curbing his eclecticism, in the book Appiah thanks his partner, Henry Finder, a New Yorker editor, for having a place in his own life similar to the one Mrs. Taylor occupied in Mill's'.
In 2006, Alan Ryan, reviewing Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers , tells of Appiah's view that "if people with vastly different religious, sexual, and political attachments are to live together without violence they must master the art of conversation."
- He demolishes two common ideas: "the first is that different cultures live to all intents and purposes in different universes; the second is that if we all live in the same universe, one story about that universe must be right and the rest just wrong."
In 2008, Appiah published Experiments in Ethics (Harvard University Press), in which he reviews the relevance of empirical research to ethical theory. Paul Bloom, in a New York Times Book Review evaluation, comments that scientists now explore how we reason about right and wrong in their attempt to explore the rationale behind our moral thoughts and feelings and
- Appiah discusses this research and what it means for ethics. Appiah isn't worried at all. . . . The idea of philosophy as an isolated discipline, Appiah argues, is a relatively newfangled idea, and not a good one. . . . Appiah is probably right when he concludes that we should place less emphasis on "character education" and focus more on trying to establish situations in which people's better selves can flourish.
Asked by strangers who find he is a philosopher "So, what's your philosophy?" He answers, "My philosophy is that everything is more complicated than you thought."
Views
For Appiah, we are much less the children of one and only one society than we image:
- We do no need, have never needed, settled community, a homogeneous system of values, in order to have a home. Cultural purity is an oxymoron. The odds are that, culturally speaking, you already live a cosmopolitan life, enriched by literature, art, and film that come from many places, and that contains influence from many more. And the marksa of cosmopolitanism in that Asante village - soccer, Muhammad Ali, hip-hop - entered their lives, as they entered yours, not as work, but as pleasure.
One of his controversial views is that race
- has been proven false on both scientific (genetics) and cultural grounds and therefore should be banished from halls of debate and the vocabularies of languages.
Culture, not race, should define any people's identity, emphasizes the author whose parents were of different races. His current interests range over African and African-American intellectual history and literary studies, ethics and philosophy of mind and language; and he has also taught regularly about African traditional religions. But his major current work has to do with the philosophical foundations of liberalism.
Publications
His website contains a list of his books, the most recent in 2012 of which is The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen 2012.
Personal
Professor Appiah has an apartment in the Chelsea section of New York City and a home near Pennington, in New Jersey, which he shares with his partner, Henry Finder, Editorial Director of the New Yorker. In 2007, he is the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and he will take on the task of Chairing the Executive Board of the American Philosophical Association in 2008. He is also currently Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies.
