Kwame Anthony Appiah

Appiah's mother's family has a long political tradition: Sir Stafford was a nephew of Beatrice Webb and was Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer (1947–1950) under Clement Attlee; his father, Charles Cripps, was Labour Leader of the House of Lords (1929–31) as Lord Parmoor in Ramsay MacDonald's government; Parmoor had been a Conservative MP before defecting to Labour.

Through his grandmother Isobel Cripps, Appiah is a descendant of John Winthrop and the New England Winthrop family of Boston Brahmins as one of his ancestors, Robert Winthrop, was a Loyalist during the American Revolutionary War and migrated to England, becoming a distinguished Vice Admiral in the Royal Navy.

Through Isobel, he is also descended from the British pharmacist James Crossley Eno.

Through Professor Appiah's father, a Nana of the Ashanti people, he is a direct descendant of Osei Tutu, the warrior emperor of pre-colonial Ghana, whose reigning successor, the Asantehene, is a distant relative of the Appiah family.

Also among his African ancestors is the Ashanti nobleman Nana Akroma-Ampim I of Nyaduom, a warrior whose name the Professor now bears.

He lives with his husband, Henry Finder, an editorial director of The New Yorker, in an apartment in Manhattan, and a home in Pennington, New Jersey with a small sheep farm.

Appiah has written about what it was like growing up gay in Ghana.

Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah (born 8 May 1954) is a British American philosopher and writer who has written about political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history.

For two years (1970–1972) Joe Appiah was the leader of a new opposition party that was made by the country's three opposing parties.

Simultaneously, he was the president of the Ghana Bar Association.

Between 1977 and 1978, he was Ghana's representative at the United Nations.

Kwame Anthony Appiah was raised in Kumasi, Ghana, and educated at Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned his BA (First Class) and PhD degrees in philosophy.

He has three sisters: Isobel, Adwoa and Abena.

As a child, he spent a good deal of time in England, staying with his grandmother Dame Isobel Cripps, widow of the English statesman Sir Stafford Cripps.

Appiah taught philosophy and African-American studies at the University of Ghana, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities from 1981 to 1988.

In 1992, Appiah published In My Father's House, which won the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English.

Appiah was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995.

Appiah became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1997.

His nephew is the actor Adetomiwa Edun.

Among his later books are Colour Conscious (with Amy Gutmann), The Ethics of Identity (2005), and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006).

He has been a close collaborator with Henry Louis Gates Jr.., with whom he edited Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience.

In 2008, Appiah published Experiments in Ethics, in which he reviews the relevance of empirical research to ethical theory.

In the same year, he was recognised for his contributions to racial, ethnic, and religious relations when Brandeis University awarded him the first Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize.

As well as his academic work, Appiah has also published several works of fiction.

His first novel, Avenging Angel, set at the University of Cambridge, involved a murder among the Cambridge Apostles; Sir Patrick Scott is the detective in the novel.

Appiah's second and third novels are Nobody Likes Letitia and Another Death in Venice.

Appiah has been nominated for, or received, several honours.

Until the fall of 2009, he served as a trustee of Ashesi University College in Accra, Ghana.

He was the 2009 finalist in the arts and humanities for the Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement.

In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine on its list of top global thinkers.

On 13 February 2012, Appiah was awarded the National Humanities Medal at a ceremony at the White House.

Appiah was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, before moving to New York University (NYU) in 2014.

He holds an appointment at the NYU Department of Philosophy and NYU's School of Law.

Appiah was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2022.

Appiah was born in London, England, to Peggy Cripps Appiah (née Cripps), an English art historian and writer, and Joe Appiah, a lawyer, diplomat, and politician from Ashanti Region, Ghana.

Until 2014, he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton (with a cross-appointment at the University Center for Human Values) and was serving as the Bacon-Kilkenny Professor of Law at Fordham University in the fall of 2008.

Appiah also served on the board of PEN American Center and was on a panel of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award.

He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at many other institutions in the US, Germany, Ghana and South Africa, and Paris.

Since 2014, he is a professor of philosophy and law at NYU.

His Cambridge dissertation explored the foundations of probabilistic semantics.