Kwame Anthony Appiah

Princeton University

Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.

Appiah has previously taught philosophy and African-American studies at the University of Ghana, Drexel, Cornell, Yale, and Harvard. In the fall of 2008, he was Bacon-Kilkenny Professor of Law at Fordham University. Appiah was also formerly a trustee of Ashesi University College in Accra, Ghana.

Appiah's books include In My Father's House, The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience (with Henry Louis Gates), The Ethics of Identity, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Experiments in Ethics, and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. He has also published the novels Avenging Angel, Nobody Likes Letitia, and Another Death in Venice

In 2012, Appiah was awarded the National Humanities Medal at a ceremony at the White House.

Featured Work

NOV 12, 2013 Podcast

Citizenship Within and Across Nations

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the role of civic honor, and its negative counterpart, shame, in shaping the political behavior of individuals and of nations, ...

The Ethics of Identity

FEB 16, 2005 Transcript

The Ethics of Identity

"Questions of identity, especially various forms of political identity, ethnicity, nationality, and politicized religion, are supposed to be problems for liberalism. So I became interested ...