Word: appiah
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While his resignation came only weeks before Cornel R. West ’74 left Harvard after a now-notorious dispute with University President Lawrence H. Summers, Appiah has always insisted that his primary reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the Summers-West flap. Instead, Appiah said he saw the move as a way to eliminate his weekly commute between Boston and New York, where he still lives with his partner...
Despite his status as a veritable academic superstar, Appiah showed up at the Book Store last Thursday—a stone’s throw from his former office, in an unpretentious navy-blue suit, with tortoise shell glasses perched on the end of his nose. He spoke carefully and delicately, with an accent that reflected his own complex identity—Appiah would draw out the “ir” in circle as an Englishman, but would pronounce the “er” in “mother” in the American...
Appiah’s father was a Ghanaian independence leader; his mother, Peggy Cripps, was the daughter of a British knight. Of his own many identities—a U.S. citizen, an African-American, a gay man—Appiah refuses to prioritize any one in particular. Echoing his argument in “The Ethics of Identity,” Appiah told me he believes no identity should be “determinative of absolutely every choice” one has to make...
...chapter on “Rooted Cosmopolitanism,” Appiah tries to make philosophical sense out of the fact that most people are averse to female circumcision but not to its male counterpart. Appiah uses this apparent contradiction to ask the larger question of how the liberal cosmopolitanism he advocates “might justify tolerance for illiberal practices that are grounded in local traditions...
...comes to the conclusion that the harm done by involuntary circumcision must be weighed against its “contributions to the meanings of particular African…identities.” Appiah spends pages analyzing the alternatives and justifying his own notion of cosmopolitanism through the lens of the liberal philosophical tradition. He makes philosophical sense out of common sense, bending and plying theories of great thinkers of the past and present to assemble a comprehensive assessment of the meaning of identity...