Kwame Anthony Appiah

Analytic · North America · born 1954

British-Ghanaian philosopher who writes about identity, race and how moral change comes about.

What it is

Kwame Anthony Appiah (born 1954) is a philosopher, born in London. He studied at Bryanston School and at Clare College, Cambridge, and has taught at Yale, Cornell, Harvard and Princeton. He was at Princeton until 2014, when he moved to New York University. His father, Joe Appiah, was a lawyer from Ghana, and his mother's family included the British statesman Sir Stafford Cripps.

His early work concerned the philosophy of language and meaning, and later books turned to questions of race, identity, culture and moral theory. He has also worked on African studies and African intellectual history.

The main ideas

Identity. He has written at length on identity, in The Ethics of Identity (2005) and The Lies That Bind (2018).
Race. With Amy Gutmann he wrote Color Conscious, on the political morality of race.
Africa and culture. In My Father's House takes up Africa in the philosophy of culture.
Many fields. He has written on political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of culture, so his work does not sit in one field.
Ethics meets research. In Experiments in Ethics he considers what empirical research means for ethical theory.
How moral change happens. The Honor Code is about how moral revolutions happen.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone asked what they are: a citizen of one country, a believer in one faith, a member of one profession, a child of one family. A question in Appiah's spirit would be how each label helps and how each could box the person in. This is an illustration, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

In My Father's House (1992) is a philosophical book on Africa in the philosophy of culture.
Color Conscious (1996, with Amy Gutmann) is on the political morality of race.
The Ethics of Identity (2005) is his book on identity.
Experiments in Ethics (2008) and The Honor Code (2010) turn to moral psychology and moral change.
The Lies That Bind (2018) rethinks identity.
Novels. He also wrote three novels: Avenging Angel (1991), Nobody Likes Letitia (1994) and Another Death in Venice (1995).

Questions and criticism

Race. It is open how philosophy and society should deal with race and its effects.
Identity and freedom. It is an open question where a group identity gives a person a place in the world and where it only constrains.

Close neighbours

Other pages worth reading alongside are those on Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

Immanuel Kant · His cosmopolitanism echoes Kant's idea that all people belong to one moral community. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Analytic thinkers

Gottlob Frege · 1848 to 1925
Bertrand Russell · 1872 to 1970
G. E. Moore · 1873 to 1958
Ludwig Wittgenstein · 1889 to 1951
Gilbert Ryle · 1900 to 1976
Karl Popper · 1902 to 1994
H. L. A. Hart · 1907 to 1992
W. V. O. Quine · 1908 to 2000
J. L. Austin · 1911 to 1960
Wilfrid Sellars · 1912 to 1989

Sources we used

Kwame Anthony Appiah · Encyclopaedia Britannica, read on 29 October 2026
Kwame Anthony Appiah · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026