Source: Wikipedia
Kwame Anthony Appiah (born 1954) is a Ghanaian-British-American philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelistwhose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history.
Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up in Ghana and earned a Ph.D. at Cambridge University. He is currently theLaurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Appiah was born in London to Enid Margaret Appiah, an art historian and writer, and Joe Emmanuel Appiah, a lawyer, diplomat, and politician from the Asante region, once part of the British Gold Coast Colony but now part of Ghana. He was raised in Kumasi, Ghana, and educated at Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned his BA (First Class) and Ph.D. in philosophy. Appiah has three sisters: Isobel, Adwoa and Abena. As a child, he also spent a good deal of time in England, staying with his grandmother Isobel, the Honourable Lady Cripps, widow of the English statesman the Right Honourable Sir Stafford Cripps.
His family has a long political tradition: his maternal grandfather Sir Stafford was Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer (1947–1950) under Clement Attlee. His own father, Charles Cripps, 1st Baron Parmoor, was the Labour Leader of the House of Lords (1929–1931) under Ramsay MacDonald; Parmoor had been a ConservativeMP before defecting to Labour. Through Professor Appiah’s father, a Nana of the Ashanti people, he is also a direct descendant of Osei Tutu, the warrior emperor of pre-colonial Ghana whose reigning successor, the Asantehene, is a distant relative of the Appiah family. Appiah has taught philosophy and African-American studies at the University of Ghana, Drexel, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities from 1981 to 1986. He is currently Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton (with a cross-appointment at the University Center for Human Values) and was serving as the Bacon-Kilkenny Professor of Law at Fordham University in the fall of 2008.
Appiah also served on the board of PEN American Center and was on a panel of judges for the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at many other institutions in the US, Germany, Ghana and South Africa, and Paris. He lives with his partner, Henry Finder, in an apartment in Chelsea, Manhattan and a home in Pennington, New Jersey. His Cambridge dissertation explored the foundations of probabilistic semantics. In 1992, Appiah published In My Father’s House, which won the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English. Among his later books are Colour Conscious (with Amy Gutmann), The Ethics of Identity (2005), and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). He has been a close collaborator with Henry Louis Gates Jr., together with whom he is an editor for The New Yorker Magazine. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. In 2008, Appiah published Experiments in Ethics, in which he reviews the relevance of empirical research to ethical theory.
In 2008, Appiah was recognized for his contributions to racial, ethnic, and religious relations when Brandeis University awarded him the first Joseph B. and Toby Glitter Prize. Until the fall of 2009, he served as a trustee of Ashesi University College in Accra, Ghana. Here, Appiah conducts his Socratic interrogations in the language and style of analytical philosophy. Appiah was the 2009 finalist in the arts and humanities for the Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement. His first novel, Avenging Angel, set at the University of Cambridge, involved a murder among the Cambridge Apostles, Sir Patrick Scott is the detective in the novel . His second and third novels are Nobody Likes Letitia and Another Death in Venice. The selections “Making Conversation” and “The Primacy of Practice” are the introduction in Cosmopolitanism. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.
Ideas
Appiah argues that the formative denotation of culture is ultimately preceded by the efficacy of intellectual interchange. From this position, his views on the efficacy of organizations such as UNICEF and Oxfam are notable for their duality: on the one hand he seems to appreciate the immediate action these organizations provide while on the other hand he points out the long-term futility of such intervention.
His focus is, instead, on the long-term political and economic development of nations according to the Western capitalist/ democratic model, an approach that relies on continued growth in the “marketplace” that is the capital-driven modern world. In “Under Western Eyes, Revisited,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty refers to this as the colonization of corporate globalization, something that is Eurocentric and which presumes that capitalism is or should be universally valued as a way of life and modernity.
However, when capitalism is introduced and it does not “take off” as in the Western world, the livelihood of the peoples involved is at stake. Thus, the ethical questions involved are certainly complex, yet the general impression in Appiah’s “Kindness to Strangers” is one which implies that it is not up to “us” to save the poor and starving, but up to their own governments. Nation-states must assume responsibility for their citizens, and a cosmopolitan’s role is to appeal to “our own” government to ensure that these nation-states respect, provide for, and protect their citizens.
If they will not, “we” are obliged to change their minds; if they cannot, “we” are obliged to provide assistance, but only our “fair share,” that is, not at the expense of our own comfort, or the comfort of those “nearest and dearest” to us. Appiah’s early philosophical work dealt with probabilistic semantics and theories of meaning, but his more recent books have tackled philosophical problems of raceand racism, identity, and moral theory.
His current work tackles three major areas: 1. the philosophical foundations of liberalism; 2. the questioning of methods in arriving at knowledge about values; and 3. the connections between theory and practice in moral life. Which all of these concepts can also be found in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Appiah has been a critic of contemporary theories of Afrocentrism.
In his essay “Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism,” Appiah argues that current Afrocentricism is striking for “how thoroughly at home it is in the frameworks of nineteenth century European thought,” particularly as a mirror image to Eurocentric constructions of race and a preoccupation with the ancient world. Appiah also finds an irony in the conception that if the source of the West lies inancient Egypt via Greece, then “its legacy of ethnocentrism is presumably one of our moral liabilities.”
Appiah’s critique of contemporary Afrocentrism has been strongly criticized by some of its leading proponents, such as Temple University African American Studies scholar and activist Molefi Asante, who has characterized Appiah’s work as “anti-African.”
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