Kwame Anthony Appiah

Philosopher

By
Craig Mondaine

Who is Kwame Anthony Appiah and what does he do? A philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist who’s accomplishments are numerous and deserved. Appiah’s philosophy focuses on political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind and African intellectual history. He is now currently the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. My paper is intended to outline his life, education, accomplishments and philosophical theory.

Appiah was born in London to Enid Margaret Appiah, an art historian and writer, and Joe Emmanuel Appiah, a lawyer, diplomat, and politician from the Asante region. Between the years 1977 and 1978 he was Ghana's representative at the United Nations. Young Appiah was raised in Kumasi, Ghana. As a child, he also spent a good deal of time in England, staying with his grandmother, Dame Isobel Cripps, widow of the English statesman Sir Stafford Cripps. Cripps was Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Minister of Finance, and was also involved in negotiating the terms for Indian independence. He currently lives in Manhatten with his husband, Henry Finder, the editorial director of the New Yorker since 1997.

Professor Appiah was educated at the University Primary School at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi; at Ullenwood Manor, in Gloucestershire, and Port Regis and Bryanston Schools, in Dorset; and, finally, at Clare College, Cambridge University, in England, where he took both B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in the philosophy department.

His Cambridge dissertation explored the foundations of probabilistic semantics, bringing together issues in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Out of that first monograph grew a second book, For Truth in Semantics, which dealt with Michael Dummett’s defenses of semantic anti-realism. Semantic anti-realism is the relation between any position involving either the denial of an objective reality or the denial that verification-transcendent statements are either true or false. Since Cambridge, he has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at many other institutions in the United States, Germany, Ghana and South Africa, as well as at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Appiah is now a member of the Princeton University faculty. As well as being associated with the Center for African American Studies, Appiah is part of the Programs in African Studies and Translation Studies, and the Departments of Comparative Literature and Politics.

Appiah argues that the formative denotation of culture is ultimately preceded by the efficacy of intellectual interchange. From this position, his views on the efficacy of organizations such as UNICEF and Oxfam are notable for their duality: on the one hand he seems to appreciate the immediate action these organizations provide while on the other hand he points out the long-term futility of such intervention. His focus is, instead, on the long-term political and economic development of nations according to the Western capitalist/ democratic model, an approach that relies on continued growth in the “marketplace” that is the capital-driven modern world. However, when capitalism is introduced and it does not "take off" as in the Western world, the livelihood of the peoples involved is at stake. Thus, the ethical questions involved are certainly complex, yet the general impression in Appiah’s "Kindness to Strangers" is one which implies that it is not up to "us" to save the poor and starving, but up to their own governments. Nation-states must assume responsibility for their citizens, and a cosmopolitan’s role is to appeal to "our own" government to ensure that these nation-states respect, provide for, and protect their citizens. If they will not, "we" are obliged to change their minds; if they cannot, "we" are obliged to provide assistance, but only our "fair share," that is, not at the expense of our own comfort, or the comfort of those "nearest and dearest" to us. Appiah has written a wide variety of published work. In 1992, Oxford University Press published In My Father’s House, which explores the role of African and African-American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. This book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Herskovitz Award of the African Studies Association for “the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English.”

So again, I ask, who is Kwame Anthony Appiah? Before this assignment I didn’t know who this man was. Now I know that he was a philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist. He is also a teacher, activist and very accomplished mind of the 21st century. Through this assignment, I appreciate him and his work that much more.

Sources
Web
http://appiah.net/biography/
Articles
“Group Rights and Racial Affirmative Action,” Journal of Ethics, Vol. 15, No. 3
“Dignity and Global Duty,” Boston University Law Review Vol. 90, No. 2
“Relativism and Cross-Cultural Understanding.” In Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology Michael Krausz (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010): 488-500.
“Battling with Du Bois,” The New York Review of Books, Thursday, December 8, 2011
“Whose Culture Is It?” in The New York Review of Books Feb 9 2006
“What Was Africa to Them?” in The New York Review of Books September 27 2007