Kwame Anthony Appiah

We often think identity is personal. However, the identities that shape the world, our struggles, and our hopes are social ones, shared with countless others. Our sense of self is shaped by our family, but also by affiliations that spread out from there, such as our nationality, culture, class, race, and religion. Taking these broad categories as a starting point,...

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how early social scientists developed our modern understandings of society through their theories of religion. The foundations of modern social science were built on the study of religion, the acclaimed thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah argues. Delving into the intellectual currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he investigates how formative thinkers—notably Edward Burnett Tylor,...

"Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range. [He] has packed into this short book an impressive amount of original reflection. A rich and illuminating book." -Thomas Nagel, New York Review of Books Idealization is a fundamental feature of human thought. We build simplified models to make sense of the world, and life is a constant adjustment between the...

In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice—whether through "color-blind" policies or through affirmative action—provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In Color Conscious, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful,...

Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do "identities" constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do...