Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Chair of the American Council of Learned Societies.

He "is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values. He was educated at Cambridge University (B.A. Philosophy, 1975; Ph.D. Philosophy, 1982). He is the author of Assertion and Conditionals, For Truth in Semantics, In My Father's House, and Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race with Amy Gutmann; and editor, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of the Dictionary of Global Culture, Encarta Africana (a CD-ROM encyclopedia), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, and the journal Transition (as well as of many collections of criticism of African and African-American writers.).

"He is on the board of the MLA, the National Humanities Center and ARTstor, and has been Chair of the Joint Committee on African Studies of the SSRC and the ACLS and President of the Society for African Philosophy in North America. His current interests range over African and African-American intellectual history and literary studies, ethics and philosophy of mind and language, but his major current work has to do with the philosophical foundations of liberalism." 

Kwame Anthony Appiah "was born in London (where his Ghanaian father was a law student) but moved as an infant to Ghana, where he grew up. His father, Joseph Emmanuel Appiah, was a lawyer and politician, who was, at various times, a Member of Parliament, an Ambassador and a President of the Ghana Bar Association; his mother, the novelist and children's writer, Peggy Appiah, whose family was English, was active in the social, philanthropic and cultural life of Kumasi, where they lived...

"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 deals, in part, with the role of African and African-American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. 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 (a) with the philosophical foundations of liberalism and (b) with questions of method in arriving at knowledge about values.

"Professor Appiah joined the Princeton faculty in 2002 as Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values. In 1996, he published Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race with Amy Gutmann; in 1997 the Dictionary of Global Culture, co?edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 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. This is now available in a revised multi-volume edition from Oxford University Press.  In 2003, he coauthored Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (of which his mother, the writer Peggy Appiah, was 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, and he reviews regulalry for the New York Review of Books. In 2004, Oxford University Press published his introduction to contemporary philosophy entitled Thinking It Through. In January 2005, Princeton University Press published The Ethics of Identity and in February 2006 Norton published Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Next year, Harvard University Press will publish his Experiments in Ethics, based on his 2004 Flexner lectures at Bryn Mawr."


 * PEN American Center, Member (1996-)
 * Chair, PEN Freedom to Write Committee (1996-2003)
 * Former Director, Sabre Foundation
 * Scholar/Advisor, International Freedom Center
 * Winner of the 2007 Council on Foreign Relations: Arthur Ross Book Award
 * International Advisory Board, MIT Program on Human Rights and Justice
 * Executive Committee, Program in African Studies