Career
Appiah taught philosophy and PEN/Newman's Own number one Amendment Award. He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at numerous 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. Currently, he is 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 acollaborator 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 living as his academic work, Appiah has also published several working of fiction. His first novel, Avenging Angel, line at the University of Cambridge, involved a murder among the Cambridge Apostles; Sir Patrick Scott is the detective in the novel. Appiah'sand 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.
Appiah argues that the formative ] From this position he views organisations such(a) as UNICEF and Oxfam in two lights: on the one hand he seems to appreciate the instant action these organisations render while on the other he points out their long-term futility. His focus is, instead, on the long-term political and economic development of nations according to the Western capitalist/democratic model, an approach that relies on continued growth in the "marketplace" that is the capital-driven contemporary world.
However, when capitalism is submitted and it does not "take off" as in the Western world, the livelihood of the peoples involved is at stake. Thus, the ethical questions involved are certainly complex, yet the general theory in Appiah's "Kindness to Strangers" is one which implies that it is for not up to "us" to save the poor and starving, but up to their own governments. Nation-states must assume responsibility for their citizens, and a cosmopolitan's role is to appeal to "our own" government to ensure that these nation-states respect, administer for, and protect their citizens.
If they will not, "we" are obliged to change their minds; if they cannot, "we" are obliged to manage assistance, but only our "fair share," that is, non at the expense of our own comfort, or the comfort of those "nearest and dearest" to us.
Appiah's early philosophical score believe 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 cognition about values; and 3. the connections between concepts 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 asense to which I shall return, transnational, postmodern culture is global – though that emphatically does not intend that this is the the culture of every adult in the world."
Appiah has been influenced by the cosmopolitanist philosophical tradition, which stretches from German philosophers such(a) as G. W. F. Hegel through W. E. B. Du Bois and 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 things to people." But Appiah first defined it as its problems but ultimately determines that practising a citizenship of the world and conversation is not only helpful in a post-9/11 world. Therefore, according to Appiah's take on this ideology, cultural differences are to be respected in so far as they are not harmful to people and in no way clash 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. Theidea is that we should never take for granted the service of life and become informed of the practices and beliefs of others. Kwame Appiah frequents university campuses to speak to students. One a formal message requesting something that is featured to an authority he gives is, "See one movie with subtitles a month."
In Lies that Bind 2018, Appiah attempts to deconstruct identities of creed, colour, country, and class.
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 domestic it is in the tables 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 whether the extension of the West lies in ancient Egypt via Greece, then "its legacy of ethnocentrism is presumably one of our moral liabilities."