Called a post-modern Socrates, Kwame Anthony Appiah asks profound questions about identity and ethics in a world where the sands of race, ethnicity, religion and nationalism continue to realign and reform before our eyes. His seminal book Cosmopolitanism is a moral manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering. In his latest book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, Appiah argues that honor and morality are two separate entities, and that social reform stems more from evolving notions of honor than a true understanding of morality. In intellectually stimulating language, Appiah challenges readers to look beyond the boundaries—real and imagined—that divide us, and to see our common humanity.
Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is also the president of the PEN American Center, the internationally acclaimed literary and human rights association. He was born in London to a Ghanaian father and a white mother; raised in Ghana; and educated in England, at Cambridge University, where he received a PhD in philosophy. As a scholar of African and African-American studies, he established himself as an intellectual with a broad reach. His classic book In My Father's House and his collaborations with Henry Louis Gates Jr.—including The Dictionary of Global Culture and Africana—are major works of African struggles for self-determination. He is a 2012 National Humanities Medal winner, and in 2007, Cosmopolitanism won the Arthur Ross Book Award, the most significant prize given to a book on international affairs. In 2009, he was featured in the documentary Examined Life, and was named one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 public intellectuals.
