KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH born on this date, is a British American philosopher and writer who has written about political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, before moving to New York University (NYU) in 2014. He holds an appointment at the NYU Department of Philosophy and NYU’s School of Law. Appiah was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2022.

Appiah was born in London, England, to Peggy Cripps Appiah (née Cripps), an English art historian and writer, and Joe Appiah, a lawyer, diplomat, and politician from Ashanti Region, Ghana. For two years Joe Appiah was the leader of a new opposition party that was made by the country’s three opposing parties. Simultaneously, he was the president of the Ghana Bar Association. Between 1977 and 1978, he was Ghana’s representative at the United Nations.

Kwame Anthony Appiah was raised in Kumasi, Ghana, and educated at Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned his BA (First Class) and PhD degrees in philosophy. He has three sisters: Isobel, Adwoa and Abena. As a child, he spent a good deal of time in England, staying with his grandmother Dame Isobel Cripps, widow of the English statesman Sir Stafford Cripps.

Appiah’s mother’s family has a long political tradition: Sir Stafford was a nephew of Beatrice Webb and was Labor Chancellor of the Exchequer (1947–1950) under Clement Attlee; his father, Charles Cripps, was Labor Leader of the House of Lords (1929–31) as Lord Parmoor in Ramsay MacDonald’s government; Parmoor had been a Conservative MP before defecting to Labor.

Through his grandmother Isobel Cripps, Appiah is a descendant of John Winthrop and the New England Winthrop family of Boston Brahmins as one of his ancestors, Robert Winthrop, was a Loyalist during the American Revolutionary War and migrated to England, becoming a distinguished Vice Admiral in the Royal Navy. Through Isobel, he is also descended from the British pharmacist James Crossley Eno.

Through Professor Appiah’s father, a Nana of the Ashanti people, he is a direct descendant of Osei Tutu, the warrior emperor of pre-colonial Ghana, whose reigning successor, the Asantehene, is a distant relative of the Appiah family. Also among his African ancestors is the Ashanti nobleman Nana Akroma-Ampim I of Nyaduom, a warrior whose name the Professor now bears.

Appiah’s academic curriculum vitae is too extensive to go into in the space available. But his presence in popular culture includes:

• In 2007, Appiah was a contributing scholar in the PBS-broadcast documentary Prince Among Slaves produced by Unity Productions Foundation.
• In 2007, he also appeared in the TV documentary series Racism: A History as an on-screen contributor.
• Appiah appeared alongside a number of contemporary philosophers in Astra Taylor’s 2008 film Examined Life, discussing his views on cosmopolitanism.
• In 2009, he was an on-screen contributor to the movie Herskovits: At the Heart of Blackness.
• In 2015, he became one of three contributors to the New York Times Magazine column “The Ethicist”, 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.
• In late 2016, he contended that Western civilization did not exist, and argued that many uniquely Western attributes and values were instead shared among many “non-western” cultures and/or eras.
• In 2018, Appiah appeared in the episode “Can We Live Forever?” of the documentary series Explained.

He lives with his husband, Henry Finder, an editorial director of The New Yorker, in an apartment in Manhattan, and a home in Pennington, New Jersey with a small sheep farm. He has written about what it was like growing up gay in Ghana.

Appiah became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1997. His nephew is the actor Adetomiwa Edun.