NYU Professor to Give Keynote Address for “Ethics of Identity” Series Appiah will speak on “The Ethics of Identity: The Injuries of Class.”

By Erica Turman
September 13, 2018

Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, is the first speaker in the 2017-18 “Ethics of Identity” series, sponsored by the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics at W&L.  His lecture is Sept. 27 at 5 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater.

Appiah will speak on “The Ethics of Identity: The Injuries of Class.” The talk is free and open to the public.

Appiah received both his B.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Clare College, Cambridge University. His early work focused on the philosophy of language and of the mind. His current interests cover areas including political philosophy, ethics, African-American intellectual history and literary studies and philosophy of the social sciences.

He has published several books, including “The Ethics of Identity” (2005), “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers” (2006), “Experiments in Ethics” (2008), “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen” (2010), and “Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity” (2014). Appiah won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, as well as the Herskovits

Award of the African Studies Association for his book: “In My Father’s House” (1992).

Appiah has taught and received recognition on a global scale and was named one of the top-100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy in 2010. He won the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2013.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. When he made his gift, Mudd said that “given the state of ethics in our current culture, this seems a fitting time to endow a center for the study of ethics, and my university is the fitting home.”

For full details on this series, visit https://www.wlu.edu/mudd-center.