Experts
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Professor, Princeton University; President, PEN American Center
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.
In 2007, he was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and he now serves as Chair of the Executive Board of the American Philosophical Association; and he is also currently Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies. In March 2009, he succeeded Francine Prose as President of the 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, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), and his most recent Experiments in Ethics (2008). He lives with his partner, Henry Finder, in Chelsea, Manhattan.
