Kwame Anthony Appiah

Lore & Background

Kwame Anthony Appiah, born in London in 1954, is a Ghanaian-English-American philosopher and writer. He was raised in Kumasi, Ghana, and educated at Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned first-class honors and a PhD in philosophy. Appiah’s ancestry is notably diverse: through his English mother, an art historian, he is a descendant of the pharmacist James Crossley Eno; through his Ghanaian father, a lawyer and diplomat from the Ashanti Region, he is a direct descendant of the warrior emperor Osei Tutu and the Ashanti nobleman Nana Akroma-Ampim I, after whom he was named. He has three sisters and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1997.

Appiah lives with his husband, Henry Finder, in Manhattan and Pennington, New Jersey, where they keep a small sheep farm. His career includes teaching philosophy and African-American studies at the University of Ghana, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, where he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy. Since 2014, he has been Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, becoming a Silver Professor in 2025.

He was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2022. Appiah’s defining characteristics include his work on political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. He has written on liberal neutrality, critiquing Carl Schmitt’s opposition to it, and his books include In My Father’s House, The Ethics of Identity, and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. He also collaborated with Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience.

Reader's Guide

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s work spans political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. His early research focused on probabilistic semantics and theories of meaning, but he later turned to philosophical problems of race, racism, identity, and moral theory. His current thinking addresses three major areas: the philosophical foundations of liberalism; questioning methods used to arrive at knowledge about values; and the connections between theory and practice in moral life. These themes are developed in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.

Appiah has also written fiction, including the novel Avenging Angel, set at Cambridge, and Nobody Likes Letitia and Another Death in Venice. He collaborated with Henry Louis Gates Jr. to edit Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. His book In My Father’s House won the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies.

In Experiments in Ethics, he reviewed the relevance of empirical research to ethical theory. Appiah has been recognized for contributions to racial, ethnic, and religious relations, receiving the first Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize from Brandeis University. He was named a top global thinker by Foreign Policy in 2010 and awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2012. He chairs the jury for the Berggruen Prize and serves on the Berggruen Institute’s Philosophy & Culture Center’s Academic Board.

Did You Know?

• According to Appiah, Schmitt believed 'real politics was, at bottom, about crushing your enemies.'
• Appiah stated that Schmitt 'was prescient in attacking neutrality before most liberal theorists even recognized the importance of the concept.'