Noted Philosopher and Author to Speak at SUNY Plattsburgh

Part of the American Democracy Project and the Presidents' Speakers Series, the presentation will take place on Thursday, March 27 at 7:30 p.m. in the E. Glenn Giltz Auditorium, Hawkins Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

The talk will center on his book, "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers." It won the 2007 Arthur Ross Award of the Council on Foreign Relations and was described in the New Yorker as "a precise yet flexible ethical manifesto for a world characterized by heretofore unthinkable interconnection but riven by escalating fractiousness." 

Appiah's current interests range over African and African-American intellectual history and literary studies, as well as the ethics and philosophy of mind and language. He has regularly taught about African traditional religions, but his current major work has to do with the philosophical foundations of liberalism and with questions of method in arriving at knowledge about values.

Appiah's experience includes teaching at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard universities and lecturing at many other institutions in the U.S., Germany, Ghana, France and South Africa. He currently teaches at Princeton.

He has been widely published in the fields of African and African-American literary and cultural studies. He is the author of "In My Father's House," a book which deals with the role of African and African-American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. Some of his other works include "Thinking It Through"; "The Ethics of Identity"; "Avenging Angel"; "Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race" which he co-authored with Amy Gutmann; the Dictionary of Global Culture and the Africana encyclopedia which he co-edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr.; and "Bu Me Be: Proverbs of the Akan" which he co-authored with his mother, Peggy Appiah.

Appiah has served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and is chair of the executive board of the American Philosophical Association and board of the American Council of Learned Societies.

For more information about his lecture at SUNY Plattsburgh, e-mail [email protected], or call her at 518-564-5402.