Speaker

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Ghanaian-British philosopher, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, and the New York Times ‘Ethicist’ columnist. His work spans moral philosophy, political theory, the philosophy of language, and African and African-American studies.

Appiah was born in London, raised in Kumasi (Ghana) in an Ashanti royal family, educated at Cambridge, and built an academic career in the United States. His father, Joe Appiah, was a Ghanaian politician and lawyer; his mother, Peggy Cripps, was the daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer in post-war Britain. That biography — two continents, two cultures, two religious traditions — is not incidental to his philosophy but constitutive of it. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) is the most widely read statement of his political thought; The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018) examines how the categories we use to sort ourselves — race, nation, religion, culture — are thinner and more contingent than we suppose.

Core positions

Appiah’s philosophy rests on a fallibilist epistemology he traces in part to Ghanaian cultural inheritance: all our pictures of the world are slightly wrong, so the right response is to hold several simultaneously rather than to discard rivals on grounds of internal inconsistency. From this base he defends a cosmopolitanism that is not rootless but relational — you must be rooted in a place, and cosmopolitanism consists in recognising that others are equally rooted in theirs, and that cross-cultural exchange enriches rather than dilutes both. He is a vigorous opponent of the nationalism–cosmopolitanism binary, arguing that a cosmopolitan patriot is not a contradiction.

On cultural heritage, Appiah reframes the repatriation debate as a question of access rather than ownership: the goal is that every person in the world lives, some of the time, near serious objects from human civilisation; national title is the wrong frame because these things ‘matter to all of us.’ On moral advice, he is candid that the Ethicist column serves its million readers more than its letter-writers, offering worked examples of how to reason about loyalty, confidentiality, and the weight of relationships. He expects the next moral revolution to involve bystander intervention — a shift from the norm that each person manages their own moral life toward public engagement with the conduct of strangers.

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