| Citation | Kwame Anthony Appiah is an outstanding candidate for honorary fellowship of the Society, amply fulfilling the criteria for election by this route. His work has addressed issues arising at the boundary of science and philosophy, and his intellectual leadership in fields addressing some of the most important contemporary issues – identity, ethics, ethnicity and cosmopolitanism – would be a very significant asset to the Society.
He was born in London, raised in Kumasi, Ghana, and studied for undergraduate and PhD degrees at Clare College, Cambridge. He has taught philosophy and African-American studies at the University of Ghana, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, Princeton Universities. Since 2014, he has been a professor of philosophy and law at NYU. His work has addressed issues arising at the boundary between philosophy and science. His doctoral dissertation considered probabilistic semantics , and his 2008 work Experiments in Ethics, reviewed the role of empirical research in ethical theory. His early philosophical work dealt with theories of truth and meaning, and three major issues underpin his current work: 1. the philosophical foundations of liberalism; 2. the questioning of methods in arriving at knowledge about values; and 3. the connections between theory and practice in moral life. All of these concepts are addressed in a key work (2008) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. He has been active in bringing philosophy to a wider audience, in the US and the UK. Since 2015, he has been author of the New York Times Magazine column "The Ethicist", which before assuming sole authorship of the column later that year. He delivered the BBC's Reith Lectures in late 2016 on the theme of Mistaken Identities.
Honours in recognition of his work include the following:
The 1993 Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association "for the best work published in English on Africa", for In My Father's House .
Annual Book Award, 1996, North American Society for Social Philosophy, "for the book making the most significant contribution to social philosophy" for Color Conscious, May 1997.
Outstanding Book on the subject of human rights in North America (Gustavus Myers Center) for Color Conscious, 1997
The Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University launched an annual Kwame Anthony Appiah Prize in 2015 in his honour for the most outstanding thesis relating to the Africa diaspora.
Times Literary Supplement's Book of the Year 2010 for The Honor Code.
The Gold Medal from The National Institute of Social Sciences in 2011.
The Presidential National Humanities Medal in 2012.
In 2022 he was appointed President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He is also the author of several novels, and, in August 2016, was enstooled as the Nkosuahene of Nyaduom, a Ghanaian chief of the Ashanti people, in Nyaduom (his family's ancestral chiefdom). Appiah’s leadership in framing debates about some of the most important contemporary philosophical issues (in the scholarly and the wider sense) is undoubted. He would be an outstanding candidate for Fellowship.
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