This clear and engaging introduction is the first book to assess the ideas of Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Ghanaian-British philosopher who is a leading public intellectual today. The book focuses on the theme of ‘identity’ and is structured around five main topics, corresponding to the subjects of his major works: race, culture, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and moral revolutions.
This helpful book:
• Teaches students about the sources, opportunities, and dilemmas of personal and social identity—whether on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or class, among others—in the purview of Appiah.
• Locates Appiah within a broader tradition of intellectual engagement with these issues—involving such thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, John Stuart Mill, and Martha Nussbaum—and, thus, how Appiah is both an inheritor and innovator of preceding ideas.
• Seeks to inspire students on how to approach and negotiate identity politics in the present.
This book ultimately imparts a more diverse and wider-reaching geographic sense of philosophy through the lens of Appiah and his intellectual contributions, as well as emphasizing the continuing social relevance of philosophy and critical theory more generally to everyday life today.