Anthony Appiah

Here is a thorough, vividly written introduction to contemporary philosophy and some of the most crucial questions of human existence: the nature of mind and knowledge, the status of moral claims, the existence of God, the role of science, and the mysteries of Janguage, among them. In Thinking It Through, esteemed philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah shows us what it means to "do" philosophy in our time and why it should matter to anyone who wishes to...

Draws on a wide range of disciplines, including history, literature, and philosophy, to examine the imaginary boundaries people have drawn around themselves and other cultures and to challenge people to redraw those boundaries and appreciate the connections between people of different cultures, religions, and nations.

"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" constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? In this work, philosopher and African Studies...

Idealization is a central feature of human thought. We build ideal models in the sciences, our politics is guided by pictures of impossible utopias, and our thinking about the arts and moral life is guided by images of how things might have been. In all these cases we sometimes proceed with a representation of the world that we know is not true or aim at a world we accept we cannot realize. This is the world of the "as if," which the philosopher Hans...

From the bestselling author of Cosmopolitanism comes this revealing exploration of how the collective identities that shape the polarized world are riddled with contradiction.

"W. E. B. Du Bois never felt so at home as when he was a student at the University of Berlin. But Du Bois was also American to his core, scarred but not crippled by the racial humiliations of his homeland. In Lines of Descent, Kwame Anthony Appiah traces the twin lineages of Du Bois' American experience and German apprenticeship, showing how they shaped the great African-American scholar's ideas of race and social identity. At Harvard, Du Bois studied...