Rate My Professor Kwame Appiah

Appiah's scholarly work focuses on ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of race and identity, philosophy of mind, the philosophy of the social sciences, African-American intellectual history, and the intersection of moral philosophy and psychology. Key publications include In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992, winner of the Herskovits Award), Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1996, with Amy Gutmann), The Ethics of Identity (2005), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006, Arthur Ross Award), Experiments in Ethics (2008), The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010), Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (2014), As If: Idealization and Ideals (2017), and The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018). He has received the National Humanities Medal (2012), the Kluge Prize (2024), the Spinozalens Prize (2016), and the Phillip L. Quinn Prize (2021), among numerous honors. Appiah served as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, President of the Modern Language Association (2016), and President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2022–). Since 2015, he has written the weekly Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine and contributes frequently to the New York Review of Books. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, Royal Society of Literature, and British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society.