Kwame Appiah to discuss ‘The Ethics of Identity’
Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at Princeton University, will present the first of the 2004-05 Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and the Arts with a talk titled "The Ethics of Identity." Appiah, the author of a book by the same title to be published in December, will speak at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 1, in Room 290 of the Law School and at a discussion on Nov. 2 at 4 p.m. at the Humanities Center.
His talk and discussion will address what Appiah calls the central topic of ethics, as the discipline first was conceived by Aristotle: "What is it to live well?" One of the most influential modern answers was given by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, where Mill argued that each of us could live well only if we are master of our own fate, Appiah wrote in a description of his upcoming lecture. He plans to "explore the significance of individuality in our highly diverse modern nations and our increasingly international lives," he wrote. "One of the central challenges to individuality as an idea is that it can seem antisocial. But I aim to show that once you understand how our identities are socially shaped, you can see that individuality, far from making us unsociable, in fact requires us to take account of the myriad ways in which our individual well-being depends on others."
Born in London in 1954 to a Ghanaian father and British mother, Appiah earned a doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University in 1982. He was a professor at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard universities before joining the faculty at Princeton in 2002. Appiah is the author of numerous scholarly works, including In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and awarded the 1993 Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association; Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1996), co-authored with Amy Gutmann; and Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (2003). He also is author of three novels, including Another Death in Venice (1995), and is co-editor, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of A Dictionary of Global Culture (1996), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience (1999) and several critical volumes on the works on African American authors.
