Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-born, Ghanian-American philosopher and cultural theorist. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and the author of the weekly Ethicist column in the New York Times. He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton, and has written widely in philosophy, especially in ethics and political philosophy, and in African and African-American Studies. He is the author of In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, and The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, and more than a dozen other philosophical works, three novels, and hundreds of articles and reviews. With Henry Louis Gates Jr., he edited the Encarta Africana for Microsoft and the five-volume Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University.
The Cosmopolitan Impulse in an Entangled World
Cosmopolitanism rests on the notion that there are many ways of leading a decent human life. Societies can put together different arrangements for leading a good life provided they respect basic human rights and entitle people to construct families, towns, cities, nations, and larger communities like the European Union or the African Union.
February 21, 2019