Thinker

Kwame Anthony Appiah quotes

7 passages in English · 1954– · Africana Philosophy.

Overview

Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954) is a British-Ghanaian philosopher who has taught at Princeton, NYU, and elsewhere. In My Father’s House, The Ethics of Identity, and Cosmopolitanism connect African philosophy, race theory, and global ethics.

Main ideas

Cosmopolitanism balances obligations to distant others with respect for particular lives and differences. Conversation across identities need not yield value-consensus; it can help people get used to one another. Values are social—like a fax machine useless if only one person has it—and fallibility motivates learning from strangers.

Major works

  • In My Father's House
  • The Ethics of Identity
  • Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Legacy

Appiah shaped contemporary debates on race as social construction, identity ethics, and a non-imperial cosmopolitanism open to African and diasporic experience.

Themes in this archive

Ethics (3) · Humility (2)

Quotes by theme

Kwame Anthony Appiah on dialogue · Kwame Anthony Appiah on otherness · Kwame Anthony Appiah on ethics

  1. Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another.
  2. The version of cosmopolitanism that I favor is exactly about balancing universality and difference.
  3. Relativism of that sort isn't a way to encourage conversation; it's just a reason to fall silent.
  4. A value is like a fax machine: it's not much use if you're the only one who has one.
  5. Cosmopolitans begin with a sense of one thing we all certainly share, which is our fallibility. Nobody has reason to be confident that they're right about everything.
  6. We have obligations to others that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by ties of kith and kind; and we must take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives.
  7. They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them.