Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah, born Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah in 1954 in London to a Ghanaian father and English mother and raised largely in Ghana, is a philosopher who has taught at Yale, Harvard, Princeton and New York University and writes across political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. He is best known for developing a philosophy of cosmopolitanism, most fully set out in his 2006 book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, which argues that people can hold obligations both to their own particular communities and to humanity as a whole, and for his critical examination of the concept of race and of African and African diaspora identity in works including In My Father's House. Appiah has also written extensively for a general audience, including a long-running ethics column for the New York Times Magazine, and has served as president of the American Philosophical Association and of PEN American Center.