Rate My Professor Kwame Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, was born in London in 1954 and raised in Ghana. He was educated at Cambridge University, earning a B.A. (Honours) in Philosophy in 1975, an M.A. in 1980, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1982. His dissertation on probabilistic semantics was published as Assertion and Conditionals (Cambridge University Press). Appiah began his academic career with teaching positions at the University of Ghana, Legon, and Clare College, Cambridge. He subsequently held faculty appointments at Yale University, Cornell University (where he was Assistant, Associate, and Professor of Philosophy and African & Afro-American Studies), Duke University, Harvard University (Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy, and Charles H. Carswell Professor), and Princeton University (Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values from 2002 to 2014). In January 2014, he joined New York University as Professor of Philosophy and Law, teaching in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Florence.

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.