Who is anthony appiah

At boarding school in Ghana, he joined a reading group of earnest young Christian men, who together read theology and later Kant and Kierkegaard. A sickly child, he had received a good deal of medical attention and grew up intending to become a doctor. He enrolled at Cambridge to train in medicine, but still took an interest in philosophy, which increasingly absorbed his studies. Around this time, he met Gates, then a graduate student who had come to Cambridge to study with Wole Soyinka.

Their friendship continued even after Appiah returned to Ghana and, without much intention of pursuing a scholarly career, took a job as a teaching assistant at the University of Ghana. He found academic life congenial, so he returned to Cambridge to earn his doctorate.

Meanwhile, an invitation from Gates soon brought him to Yale, where he taught a seminar on pan-Africanism, a movement in which his father had been active. Using his linguistic philosophical training to consider the matter of race, Appiah argued in Color Conscious against race as a biological construct, as it was understood in the nineteenth century by Matthew Arnold and others.

Faculty K. Anthony Appiah. Faculty and Topics Entire Site. Anthony Appiah Professor of Philosophy and Law. Assistant: Giselle Tsikaridis giselle. Featured Work. In his most recent book, K. Anthony Appiah traces the twin lineages of W. Courses Life of Honor Seminar Honor is especially interesting as a challenge for the law, because it is, among other things, a normative system that competes with the law for allegiance. His Cambridge dissertation, advised by D.

Mellor , explored the foundations of probabilistic semantics, bringing together issues in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind; once revised, these arguments were published by Cambridge University Press as Assertion and Conditionals. Professor Appiah has also published widely in literary and cultural studies, with a focus on African and African-American culture. His work at the interface of ethics and psychology was recognized in a special issue of the journal Neuroethics devoted to his book Experiments in Ethics.

His work on identity was the subject of a symposium on The Lies that Bind in the journal Philosophy and Public Issues in He also has a continuing interest in literary criticism and theory and a issue of the journal New Literary History was devoted to his work; but his major current work has to do with the connection between theory and practice in moral life.

He is working at the same time on two larger projects. One explores some of the many ways in which we now think about religion; another examines the ethical and political consequences of the changing nature of work. This is now available in a revised multi-volume edition from Oxford University Press. He is also the author of three novels, of which the first, Avenging Angel , was largely set at his alma mater, Clare College, Cambridge, and he has written and reviewed regularly for the New York Review of Books.

Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity. Entitled As If: Idealization and Ideals , it discusses the role of idealization and ideals in science, philosophy, ethics and political philosophy. Norton in the United States in But in high school while I was doing all this stuff to get ready to go medical school I was enjoying and reading philosophy with friends and with a couple of teachers who ran clubs for that sort of thing. Now, the first thing you do as an undergraduate medical student at Cambridge, week one, you go and you meet this dead body, which you have to cut up.

And it became clear to me that I was going to have to adjust if I was going to do this, because I'm pretty squeamish. And also in those days it was very boring. You just had to learn the names of things.