Kwame Anthony Appiah

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

Ideas

Responses

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanian-American philosopher, cultural theorist and novelist. His interests lie primarily in ethics, political theory, African intellectual history, and the philosophy of language and the mind. Born in London and raised in Kumasi, Ghana, Appiah attended the Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, later earning his PhD in philosophy at the University. He has taught philosophy and African and African-American studies at University of Ghana, Cambridge, Duke, Cornell, Yale, Harvard and, most recently, Princeton University, where he is Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy. He has served on the board of PEN American Center. While his early work dealt mainly with problems of semantics and structuralism, philosophically, Appiah is influenced by the cosmopolitanist tradition and issues of race and identity. He has published three novels, including Avenging Angel (1991), a murder mystery. His many nonfiction books, for which he's better known, include In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1993), winner of the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English, and his most recent, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). Appiah is a co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for Transition magazine. He lives with his partner, Henry Finder, in Chelsea, Manhattan.

Ideas recorded on: 7/31/07

Interests

Most Recent Idea

Truth & Justice

Re: What is your question?

12/27/2007

Description: Maybe we should re-evaluate the whole idea of certainty.

Transcript: Well it goes back, I think, to the epistemological problem that I think we face as creatures in our . . . in our world. So I think one question that I think is always useful to ask in political context is, “If I am so sure I’m right, how come she’s so sure she’s right too?” If it’s obvious what . . . to me the answer is; if the answer’s obvious, why isn’t it obvious to the other person? And I think just that sort of turn taking – standing in the other’s man’s moccasins, walking in the other man’s moccasins kind of thing of saying, “Well I’m so sure I’m right about this, and yet here are these other people who don’t think what I think.” How is that? Are they just fools or irrational? Or is there some part of reality that’s hidden from them? Or could it be that I ought to reflect more carefully on what I think, and listen a bit more to what they have to say. So that’s a kind of _________ you’d expect from a philosopher. It’s a question you asked me to . . . a question about questions. It’s an answer about answers. It’s an answer about questions about questions. But I think that it is . . . it is . . . it is a useful perspective to adopt given the conflicts that we have in the world today about many important matters.

Recorded on: 7/31/07