Appiah receives an honorary doctorate from Yale; his new book 'Captive Gods' is out

Kwame Anthony Appiah received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities at Yale University's 325th commencement.

The citation read by President Maurie McInnis summarised the philosopher's central claim in two lines: Appiah's work has shown that the ideas of nationality, religion and tradition are "not walls that divide us but starting points for conversation". The text called him a "cosmopolitan cartographer".

A return to Yale#

The connection is an old one. While completing his doctorate at Cambridge, Appiah received a joint appointment from Yale and, encouraged by Henry Louis Gates Jr, joined the university's departments of Philosophy and of African and African American Studies. The two later worked together on Africana, a comprehensive reference work on African and African American culture.

Appiah is now Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He has also taught at Cornell, Duke, Harvard and Princeton.

The new book: Captive Gods#

Appiah's new book, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, is published by Yale University Press; the Church Times reviewed it in February.

The book examines the relationship between religion and the birth of the social sciences. As anthropology, sociology and religious studies were established in the nineteenth century, the concept of "religion" was itself shaped by those disciplines. Appiah traces that mutual construction.

Cosmopolitanism#

Appiah's best-known book is Cosmopolitanism (2006). Its proposal tries to escape the sterile argument between universalism and cultural relativism: people do not hold the same values everywhere, but that does not mean they cannot understand one another. Cosmopolitanism is not a promise of full agreement but an obligation to keep the conversation going.

He often quotes the advice his father gave him and his sisters: "Remember that you are citizens of the world."

Honours and offices#

Appiah received the Arthur Ross Book Award in 2007, the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2012, an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 2022 and, most recently, the Library of Congress Kluge Prize. He has served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and of the Modern Language Association, and is currently president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Ethicist, the column he has written in The New York Times Magazine for a decade, carries philosophy to a wide readership by way of everyday moral dilemmas.