Rate My Professor K Anthony Appiah

New York University

Philosophy Law Political Science Social Science History Literature Ethics Social and Political Philosophy Philosophy of Science Jurisprudence History of Philosophy Literary Theory

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5.04/23/2026

Always goes the extra mile for students.

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About K

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He grew up in Ghana and was educated at Cambridge University, where he received a BA from Clare College in 1975 and a PhD in philosophy in 1982. He taught at the University of Ghana, Cambridge University, Yale University, Cornell University, Duke University, Harvard University, and Princeton University, where he served as Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy from 2002 to 2014 and holds emeritus status. Since 2014, Appiah has been at NYU, teaching in the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science and at the School of Law, with courses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and other global sites.

Appiah's research specializations and academic interests include ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of race, theories of social identity, philosophy of the social sciences, African and African-American intellectual history, literary criticism, and the connections between moral philosophy and psychology. His key publications encompass Assertion and Conditionals (Cambridge University Press), For Truth in Semantics (1985), In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1992, winner of the Herskovits Award and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award), Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (co-authored with Amy Gutmann, 1996), The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2006, Arthur Ross Award), The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (W. W. Norton, 2010), Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (Harvard University Press, 2014), As If: Idealization and Ideals (Harvard University Press, 2017), The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity (W. W. Norton, 2018), and forthcoming Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science (Yale University Press, 2025). He has also authored three mystery novels, two textbook introductions to philosophy, and co-edited the Dictionary of Global Culture (1997) and Bu Me Bɛ: Proverbs of the Akan (2003). Appiah's major awards and honors include the National Humanities Medal presented by President Obama (2012), Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity (Library of Congress, 2024), Spinozalens Prize (2016), Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize (2008), and honorary degrees from Cambridge University (2022), Duke University (2019), and others. He is President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, former President and Board Chair of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, Fellow of the Royal Society, Royal Society of Literature, British Academy, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society. Since 2015, he has written the Ethicist column for The New York Times Sunday magazine.