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Kwame Anthony Appiah's Analysis

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In exploring Kwame Anthony Appiah's interview in Examined Life, I found his approach to answering questions from the author Astra Taylor pretentious yet thought provoking. It was clearly an adventurous journey into altruism, past that of the consanguineal family or even tribes, into that of the entire global population through what he calls cosmopolitanism. His claims about cosmopolitanism in our new globalized world appear to be from that of an atheist, steeped in values arriving from philosophers not Christianity, and demonstrated through many, but not all of the key components of an academic argument.Appiah is the author of two books focusing on the idea of cosmopolitanism in which Astra Taylor wished to take aim in their interview. …show more content…
I think Appiah's argument has all these elements but his argument is one that is complex. Wilhoit defines this as a claim that has multiple assertions with casual or conditional relationships between them. Since Appiah seeks to answer the problem of globalization with cosmopolitanism, I believe the relationship between the two to be conditional which Wilhoit's text defines as: "if A is the case, then B follows." This makes for an interesting academic argument in that both of Appiah's claims are debatable. The first being that we live in a globalized world weather it be economic, informational or biological. and the second being we need cosmopolitanism to handle it. His claims are debatable yet qualified in examples such as the one given for informational globalization. Appiah explains that he has ancestors in Africa and Europe that a hundred years ago would have taken each other a very long time to hear from one another yet now it takes only milliseconds now thanks to email. This is a compelling first person example through Appiah's observation of facts surrounding our informational interconnectedness that support the idea of globalization, and according to Wilhioit's text, are many of the forms of evidence needed to support a claim. The second claim that cosmopolitanism is needed to answer globalization is qualified by Appiah stating as fact that religions love everybody but want everyone to become like them in order to love them properly. Whereas cosmopolitanism is accepting of everyone without the condition of becoming the same. These observations in my opinion don't support the claim because they lack concrete evidence and appear to be stereotypes rather than

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