Kwame Anthony Appiah: 12 books

The beating of Rodney King and the resulting riots in South Central Los Angeles. The violent clash between Hasidim and African-Americans in Crown Heights. The boats of Haitian refugees being turned away from the Land of Opportunity. These are among the many racially-charged images that have burst...

From the best-selling author of Cosmopolitanism comes this revealing exploration of how the collective identities that shape our polarized world are riddled with contradiction. Who do you think you are? That’s a question bound up in another: What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race....

Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do "identities"...

“A brilliant and humane philosophy for our confused age.”—Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell Kwame Anthony Appiah’s landmark new work, featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, challenges the separatist doctrines espoused in books like Samuel Huntington’s The...

"[Appiah's] work reveals the heart and sensitivity of a novelist. . . .Fascinating, erudite and beautifully written."—The New York Times Book Review In this groundbreaking work, Kwame Anthony Appiah, hailed as "one of the most relevant philosophers today" (New York Times Book Review), changes...

Thinking it Through is a thorough, vividly written introduction to contemporary philosophy and some of the most crucial questions of human existence, including the nature of mind and knowledge, the status of moral claims, the existence of God, the role of science, and the mysteries of language. Noted...

Idealization is a basic feature of human thought. We proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. Kwame Anthony Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination in science, morality, and everyday life and shows that our best chance for accessing reality is to open our minds to a plurality of idealized depictions.

Moralische Revolutionen entstehen nicht durch neue Einsichten. Die Argumente gegen die Sklaverei, gegen das Duell, gegen das Füßebinden in China waren schon lange in der Welt, bevor sich die Gesellschaft zu Veränderungen entschloss. Mit erzählerischem Glanz und analytischer Schärfe führt Appiah...

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry,...

Michael Ignatieff draws on his extensive experience as a writer and commentator on world affairs to present a penetrating account of the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this revolution...

In this important book, a distinguished group of historians, political scientists, and legal experts explore three related issues: the Immigration and Naturalization Service's historic review of its citizenship evaluation, recent proposals to alter the oath of allegiance and the laws governing dual...

An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “kosmo-polites,” or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism...