Kwame Anthony Appiah
You can be loyal to your own people and still owe respect and concern to strangers everywhere – and race is not a real essence.
Placement
British-Ghanaian philosopher: a “rooted cosmopolitanism” that combines loyalty to one’s own with respect for strangers.
Key ideas
- Rooted cosmopolitanism
- Critique of racial essentialism
- Ethics of identity
Influence
Influenced by 5
Diogenes of Sinope
influenced by
Appiah began from Diogenes’ claim to be a ‘citizen of the cosmos’, reading it as concern for all humans beside local loyalties, not world government (Cosmopolitanism, 2006). K. A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006); Diogenes Laertius, Lives VI
Evidence: AI draft
Diogenes of Sinope › c. 412–323 BCE
Immanuel Kant
influenced by
Appiah counted Kant’s proposal of a league of nations (Perpetual Peace, 1795) among the Enlightenment sources of his cosmopolitanism of universal concern and respect for difference (Cosmopolitanism, 2006). K. A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006); I. Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795)
Evidence: AI draft
Immanuel Kant › 1724–1804
John Stuart Mill
influenced by
Appiah opened The Ethics of Identity (2005) with Mill’s ideal of individuality from On Liberty and asked how it fits with social identities. K. A. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (2005); J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859)
Evidence: AI draft
John Stuart Mill › 1806–1873
Kwasi Wiredu
influenced by
In In My Father’s House (1992, ch. 6) Appiah took up Wiredu’s argument that African traditional thought should be compared with Western folk thought rather than with Western science. K. A. Appiah, In My Father’s House (1992), ch. 6 “Old Gods, New Worlds”; K. Wiredu, “How Not to Compare African Thought with Western Thought” (1976), in Philosophy and an African Culture (1980)
Evidence: AI draft
Kwasi Wiredu › 1931–2022
Paulin Hountondji
influenced by
Appiah endorsed Hountondji’s critique of ethnophilosophy as the myth of a unanimous collective worldview, while asking what African philosophy can be (In My Father’s House, 1992). K. A. Appiah, In My Father’s House (1992), “Ethnophilosophy and Its Critics”; P. J. Hountondji, Sur la « philosophie africaine » (1976)
Evidence: AI draft
Paulin Hountondji › 1942–2024
Criticism
Criticizes 4
Alexander Crummell
criticised
Appiah argued that Crummell’s Pan-Africanism rested on a racial conception of Africa and on a low view of African cultures, which he took as the starting point of his critique of racialism. K. A. Appiah, In My Father’s House (1992), ch. 1 “The Invention of Africa”
Evidence: AI draft
Alexander Crummell › 1819–1898
W. E. B. Du Bois
criticised
Appiah argued that Du Bois’s socio-historical concept of race in ‘The Conservation of Races’ (1897) relies on the biological one it seeks to replace (‘The Uncompleted Argument’, 1985). K. A. Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race”, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 21–37; In My Father’s House (1992), ch. 2
Evidence: AI draft
W. E. B. Du Bois › 1868–1963
Placide Tempels
criticised
Appiah objected that Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy, like ethnophilosophy generally, ascribes one folk philosophy to a whole people as a coherent system (In My Father’s House, 1992). K. A. Appiah, In My Father’s House (1992), ch. 5 “Ethnophilosophy and Its Critics”
Evidence: AI draft
Placide Tempels › 1906–1977
Molefi Kete Asante
criticised
Appiah criticised the new Afrocentrism as inverting rather than overcoming Eurocentrism and as resting on a racial idea of Africa; Asante replied. K. A. Appiah, “Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism”, TLS (12 Feb. 1993), repr. in R. R. Grinker and C. B. Steiner (eds.), Perspectives on Africa (1997); M. K. Asante, “A Quick Reading of Rhetorical Jingoism: Anthony Appiah and His Fallacies”
Evidence: AI draft
Molefi Kete Asante › b. 1942
Works
Essays against the idea of race and of a single African worldview – from Alexander Crummell and Du Bois to ethnophilosophy, nativism and the postcolonial.
Universal concern and respect for legitimate difference – conversation rather than consensus.
Position
Appiah began in the philosophy of language but became known for his work on race, identity and cosmopolitanism. He argues that “race” has no biological basis that could justify the moral weight placed on it; identities are real, but they are social constructions that should open up our lives rather than script them. His “rooted cosmopolitanism” joins two ideas: we have obligations to all human beings, and we may still be attached to particular places, people and traditions. Conversation across differences, not agreement on principles, is what makes coexistence possible. In The Honor Code he examined how moral revolutions, such as the end of duelling, actually happen.
Life & context
Appiah was born in London in 1954 and grew up in Kumasi, Ghana; his father was a Ghanaian lawyer and politician, his mother an English writer. He studied at Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate in philosophy. He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard and Princeton, and since 2014 at New York University. He has also written the “Ethicist” column for The New York Times.
Further main works
- The Ethics of Identity (2005)
- The Honor Code (2010)
- The Lies That Bind (2018)
Appears in
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