Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Wednesday, 02 Oct 2013 at 8:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union
Kwame Anthony Appiah, named one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 public intellectuals, is the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is also the president of the PEN American Center, the world's oldest human rights organization. In 2012 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by the White House. 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. His book In My Father's House and his collaborations with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., including The Dictionary of Global Culture and Africana, are major works of African struggles for self-determination. His latest book is The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. Part of the Technology, Globalization & Culture Series and the World Affairs Series.Anthony Appiah's book Cosmopolitanism 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. How is it possible to consider the world a moral community when there is so much disagreement about the nature of morality? Anthony Appiah presents answers that are grounded in a new ethics which celebrates our common humanity, while at the same time offering a practical way to manage our differences. He offers a new approach to living a moral life in the modern age, where the competing claims of "a Clash of Civilizations" on one hand, and a groundless moral relativism on the other, can make such a project seem impossible.
Cosponsored By:
- College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- George Gund Lecture Fund
- International Studies Program
- Philosophy & Religious Studies
- Technology, Globalization & Culture Series
- World Affairs
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
Stay for the entire event, including the brief question-and-answer session that follows the formal presentation. Most events run 75 minutes.
Sign-ins are after the event concludes. For lectures in the Memorial Union, go to the information desk in the Main Lounge. In other academic buildings, look for signage outside the auditorium.
Lecture Etiquette
- Stay for the entire lecture and the brief audience Q&A. If a student needs to leave early, he or she should sit near the back and exit discreetly.
- Do not bring food or uncovered drinks into the lecture.
- Check with Lectures staff before taking photographs or recording any portion of the event. There are often restrictions. Cell phones, tablets and laptops may be used to take notes or for class assignments.
- Keep questions or comments brief and concise to allow as many as possible.