Kwame Anthony Appiah is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at NYU. Born in London, he moved as an infant to Kumasi, Ghana, where he grew up, and where his three sisters were born. He took BA and PhD degrees in philosophy at Cambridge and has held professorships at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton. He explored questions of African and African American identity in In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture; examined the cultural dimensions of global citizenship in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers; explored gender, race, nationality, religion, and culture, as sources of identity in The Lies that Bind. He’s also written three mystery novels. He has been President of the PEN American Center, the Modern Language Association, the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has served on the Board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the World Monuments Fund, the New York Public Library and New York’s Public Theater. In 2012 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. In 2024 he won the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity from the Library of Congress. His most recent book is Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science.
