2015 - 2016: Kwame Anthony Appiah
About Kwame Anthony Appiah
Named one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 global thinkers, Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He considers readers' ethical quandaries in a weekly column as "The Ethicist" for The New York Times Magazine. He has previously taught at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke and the University of Ghana. From 2009 to 2012 he served as President of the PEN American Center, the world's oldest human rights organization.
Kwame Anthony Appiah writes and lectures on multiculturalism, global citizenship, identity, honour and religion. His book Cosmopolitanism (2006) is a manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering. Cosmopolitanism won the Arthur Ross Book Award, the most significant prize given to a book on international affairs. In 2009, Forbes Magazine named Professor Appiah as one of the world's seven most powerful thinkers, selected by Princeton University's President. In his book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010), Professor Appiah lays out how honour propelled moral revolutions in the past-and could do so in the future. More recent publications include Lines of Descent: W.E.B. DuBois and the Emergence of Identity (2014) and A Decent Respect: Honor in the Lives of People and of Nations (2015).
Kwame Anthony Appiah was born in London to a Ghanaian father and a white mother. He was 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. In 2012, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by The White House; he has received thirteen honorary degrees as well as numerous other awards.