Kwame Anthony Appiah b. 1954

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian-British and American philosopher whose work has reshaped contemporary debates on ethics, identity, race, and cosmopolitanism. In My Father's House offered a critical philosophical history of African and African-American identity politics, while The Ethics of Identity and Cosmopolitanism defended a moral universalism rooted in conversation across difference rather than the dissolution of particular attachments. The Honor Code argued that moral revolutions are driven not by argument alone but by changes in the codes of honor that bind communities, and his New York Times Magazine column has made him one of the most widely read public philosophers writing in English.

Kwame Anthony Appiah was born in London in May 1954, the son of the Ghanaian statesman Joe Appiah and the English novelist Peggy Cripps, daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps. He grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, took his bachelor's and doctorate at Clare College, Cambridge, the doctorate in 1982 under Timothy Smiley with a thesis on probability and conditionals, and has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton, where he held the Laurance S. Rockefeller chair; since 2014 he has been Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He has written 'The Ethicist' column in the New York Times Magazine since 2015.

His books include Assertion and Conditionals (1985), In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), Color Conscious (1996, with Amy Gutmann), Thinking It Through (2003), The Ethics of Identity (2005), Cosmopolitanism (2006), Experiments in Ethics (2008), The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010), Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (2014), As If: Idealization and Ideals (2017), and The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018).

Appiah has argued that the great identity categories of the modern world — race, religion, nation, class, culture — are mostly conceptual mistakes whose moral weight nonetheless cannot be wished away, defended a rooted cosmopolitanism that takes seriously both particular allegiances and obligations to strangers, and reconstructed the role of honour in moral revolutions from duelling to the abolition of slavery. He combines technical philosophy with widely read public writing on race, ethics, and African thought.