Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian-British philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose work examines ethics, identity, race, and cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitanism: A view that people belong to a shared human community while retaining obligations to particular communities. Appiah develops a cosmopolitan ethic grounded in conversation across cultural difference.
The Ethics of Identity: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 2005 book examining how collective identities shape individual lives and ethical choices. It sets out his account of identity as influential but not all-defining.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.: An American literary critic and historian whose scholarship transformed the study of African American literature and culture. Appiah collaborated with Gates on scholarship about African and African American culture.
Honor killing: The murder of a person by relatives who claim the act restores family or community honor. Appiah uses honor-based practices to examine how social norms can sustain violence.
In My Father's House: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 1992 book examining African identity, cultural authenticity, and the idea of an African philosophy. This early work challenges claims that African identity depends on cultural purity.
Social identity: A person’s sense of self shaped by membership in social groups and the meanings attached to them. His account treats identities as socially formed without making them destiny.
The Honor Code: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 2010 book arguing that shifts in honor can help drive moral revolutions. It shows how social esteem can change practices that argument alone has not ended.
W. E. B. Du Bois: An American sociologist, historian, and civil-rights activist who analyzed race, colonialism, and African American life. Appiah engages critically with Du Bois’s account of race and African identity.
Female genital mutilation: Procedures that alter or injure female genital organs for nonmedical reasons, often affecting girls and women. Debates over the practice test how to oppose harm without stereotyping whole cultures.
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 2006 book presenting cosmopolitanism as both universal concern and respect for human difference. It offers his most direct account of cosmopolitanism as an ethical practice.

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Contemporary philosophyRelated: His writing brings questions of culture and identity into contemporary moral and political philosophy.