On August 11, the Library of Congress announced that Kwame Anthony Appiah, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law, is the 2024 recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity.
The annual award “recognizes and celebrates work of the highest quality and greatest impact that advances understanding of the human experience,” according to the Library’s John W. Kluge Center. It honors high achievement in areas of scholarship not recognized by the Nobel Prize, including philosophy, history, anthropology, religion, and criticism in the arts and humanities, among other subjects.
In his numerous books and articles, Appiah has explored a broad spectrum of topics that include identity, ethics, the philosophy of language and the mind, and African and African American cultural studies. With roots in both Ghana and Britain, he first gained widespread prominence with the publication of his groundbreaking, partially autobiographical 1992 book In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. It analyzes misconceptions that have clouded discussions of race, Africa, and nationalism since the 19th century and asserts that race is a social construct with no legitimate biological basis. In his 2006 work, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Appiah advocates a stance of global citizenship that shares moral responsibility to all of humanity while also accepting and valuing differences in belief, color, and creed.
More recently, Appiah’s 2018 book, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, argues that social identities—whether racial, religious, national, class, or cultural—always involve various myths and misconceptions, even as they create important forms of solidarity.
Appiah joined the NYU Law faculty in 2014, with a dual appointment in the Department of Philosophy. He teaches both in New York and in Abu Dhabi. From 2002 to 2013, he taught at Princeton University, where he had appointments in the Philosophy Department and the University Center for Human Values, as well as being associated with the Center for African American Studies, the Programs in African Studies and Translation Studies, and the Departments of Comparative Literature and Politics. Appiah has also taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at many other institutions around the world. With Henry Louis Gates, he co-edited Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience.
Appiah earned his BA and PhD degrees in philosophy at Clare College, Cambridge University. His Cambridge dissertation brought together issues in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, which led to two books, Assertion and Conditionals and For Truth in Semantics. He is also the author of three novels and of a weekly column on personal ethics for the New York Times Magazine.
Earlier this year, Appiah was elected as an honorary member of the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the independent scientific academy of the United Kingdom, and became an International Fellow of the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Appiah is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012.
