Avenali Lectures

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Avenali Chair in the Humanities 1994-1995

“Identity Against Culture” || September 13, 1994

Occasional Paper || Kwame Anthony Appiah was born in Ghana, educated at Cambridge University, and is currently Professor of African-American Studies at Harvard University. He holds an eminent position among scholars whose interests connect philosophy and questions of culture and identity. The author of a number of scholarly works in philosophy including Necessary Questions: An introduction to Philosophy, For Truth in Semantics, and Assertion and Conditionals, Professor Appiah is perhaps best known for My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, which received the Herskovitz Award of the African Studies Association for the best work published in English on Africa. Appiah has written numerous articles across a broad spectrum of subjects; has co-edited (with H.L. Gate, Jr.) critical anthologies on eight African-American and African writers; and has written two works of fiction: Avenging Angels (1991) and Nobody Likes Harvard. He taught philosophy, literature, and African and African-American Studies at Yale, Cornell and Duke Universities.

Respondents David Hollinger, Angela Harris, and Jorge Klor de Alva contributed their comments in a discussion session that followed the lecture on September 14, 1994.