First Ethics & Politics Lecture
Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Cosmopolitianism"

Cosmopolitan, or global citizenship, is the idea that our obligations to others go beyond responsibility simply to our family, friends and fellow citizens and extend globally to people everywhere. At the same time, cosmopolitans value the differences between people. Seeking a balance between common humanity and cultural specificity, cosmopolitans are philosophical universalists who accept difference.

Kwame Anthony Appiah has taught philosophy and African and African-American studies at Cambridge, Duke, Cornell, Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities.   Currently, he is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton with a cross-appointment at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values. Professor Appiah’s recent books treat ethical and political issues regarding identity, race and racism, cosmopolitanism, the relevance of empirical research to ethics and the role of honor in moral reform.   His early philosophical work deals with probabilistic semantics and theories of meaning. His books include Assertion and Conditionals (Cambridge), In My Father’s House:   Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford), Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (with Amy Gutmann) (Princeton), Thinking It Through:   An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford), The Ethics of Identity (Princeton), Experiments in Ethics (Harvard), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W.W. Norton) and, most recently, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (W.W. Norton). He is also co-editor, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience (Oxford) as well as author of novels including Avenging Angel and Another Death in Venice. Born in London, Professor Appiah was raised in Ghana and received his doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University.

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The Paul and Gwen Leonard Ethics and Politics Lecture is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Reno, and the Leonard Endowment in Philosophy.

Complimentary parking available on the top floor of the Brian J. Whalen Parking Structure.