Kwame Anthony Appiah | |
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Born |
Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah May 8, 1954 London, England, United Kingdom |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Clare College, Cambridge |
Thesis | Conditions for conditionals (1981) |
School or tradition | Cosmopolitanism |
Influences | G. W. F. Hegel, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Rawls, Charles Taylor |
Academic work | |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Main interests | Probabilistic semantics, political theory, moral theory, intellectual history, race and identity theory |
Notes | |
Spouse Henry Finder
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Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah (/ˈæpɪɑː/ AP-ee-ah; born May 8, 1954) is a British-born Ghanaian-Americanphilosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, before moving to New York University in 2014. He currently holds an appointment at the NYU Department of Philosophy and NYU's School of Law.
Appiah was born in London to Enid Margaret Appiah (née Cripps), a British art historian and writer of English heritage, and Joe Emmanuel Appiah, a lawyer, diplomat, and politician from the Asante region, once part of the British Gold Coast colony but now part of Ghana. For two years (1970–1972) Joe Appiah was the leader of a new opposition party that was made by the country's three opposing parties, simultaneously he was the president of the Ghana Bar Association. Between 1977 and 1978, he was Ghana's representative at the United Nations. He died in an Accra hospital in 1990.
Anthony Appiah was raised in Kumasi, Ghana, and educated at Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned his BA (First Class) and PhD degree in philosophy. Appiah has three sisters: Isobel, Adwoa and Abena. As a child, he also spent a good deal of time in England, staying with his grandmother Isobel, the Honourable Lady Cripps, widow of the English statesman the Right Honourable Sir Stafford Cripps.