Appiah Wins Kluge Prize
Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, is the winner of the 2024 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity.
The Kluge Prize is awarded by the Library of Congress. It “recognizes and celebrates work of the highest quality and greatest impact that advances understanding of the human experience.”
The prize is $500,000. It was endowed by entrepreneur John Kluge and awarded for the first time in 2003.
The Library of Congress says:
Appiah is… internationally recognized for his contributions to the study of philosophy as it relates to ethics, language, nationality, and race. Appiah also writes ‘The Ethicist’ in The New York Times Magazine, a feature that explores ethical approaches to solving interpersonal problems… Appiah is the author of more than a dozen books. These include academic studies of the philosophy of language, a textbook introduction to contemporary philosophy, and “In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture” (Oxford University Press, 1992), considered a canonical work in contemporary Africana studies… Appiah is the current President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has served as President of the PEN America Center, a Member of the Advisory Board of the National Museum for African Art, as Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies, and as president of the Modern Language Association and of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division.
The New York Times reports:
Appiah, 70, said in an interview that the variety [of topics he has written on] was thanks to figures like his longtime friend and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. as well as the British philosopher Dorothy Emmet, who encouraged him to apply his analytic philosophy to whatever interested him. “Being trained in philosophy has helped me to answer these questions, but they’re not philosophers’ questions,” he said. “They’re questions anybody might have thinking about their lives.”
A list of previous winners of the Kluge prize is here.
One hopes that this award was not made on the basis of his Ethicist column in the NYT where he argued that it would be a good thing to denounce someone on a “green card marriage” to the authorities. Having promoted this text on twitter, he then proceeded to block anyone who disagreed with him (however mildly) on this topic, including some distinguished (and I’m not including myself!) writers on immigration.
The column
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/magazine/should-you-report-a-green-card-marriage.html
Appiah also blocked me immediately after I pointed out his obvious mistake.
The NYTImes and the New Yorker are center-right publications only seeming left in relation to more overtly reactionary rags like The Atlantic. That said not sure that Ethics can ever be anything other than prescriptive and really just matters of taste (which is not to discount the effects just looking at what it seems to be based in).
be interested to know how widely his works are taught in analytic programs in the US
I teach “Whose Culture Is It?” regularly in my intro classes.
thanks tho would you think of it as a kind of fundamental text that students interested in doing philo will build on or more fit for non-majors?
It’s not fundamental, no, but it makes for a good and controversial introduction to a topic with a rich contemporary literature in aesthetics (cultural appropriation and cultural property), and with crossover to the history and philosophy of science and political philosophy.
thanks, seems like this kind of work plays well on the BBC or advice columns but not so much in graduate seminars.
Seems to me you’re shifting the goalposts an awful lot here.
But look. If you’re teaching a graduate seminar on cultural property/appropriation, it’s a fine text there, too, because it’s worth reading someone pushing the human patrimony angle (there are a few in that literature who push it, but it’s fairly controversial and a lot of that material is perhaps better pitched at higher levels, but really, you can teach all sorts of stuff at the intro level as long as you yourself are comfortable with it and the background literature). That angle came under serious fire from philosophers of the historical sciences (e.g. Alison Wylie) in the ’90s, and that’s a chunk of philosophy of science that’s both well worth reading, and better pitched at higher levels. It’s a fine jumping-off point for any number of more nuanced and in-depth discussions. There’s plenty of material out there for a cool grad seminar on cultural property/appropriation. Appiah’s is an article that fits just fine in a number of contexts.
I can’t speak to his other work. But you asked if he’s much taught in analytic contexts and, while I’m not in the US, the answer is that I (an analytic in an analytic department) teach one paper of his in 4+ sections of intro every year.
At least for a long time in “analytic” philosophy of race (or sometimes philosophy of social science) classes, his work on race was among the most widely taught, I think. (When I TA’d a philosophy of race class for Naomi Zack many years ago, we read a good deal of his work, for example.) I haven’t looked at a class like that (or taught one) in a while, so it’s possible that people are mostly teaching newer things, but it was certainly very influential and taught regularly for some time. (Maybe it still is. Others can say more.)
I don’t get to teach such work in the job I have, but if I did, I’d be excited to teach his _Experiments in Ethics_, which does a really nice job of showing how both X-Phil and situationionism is (and isn’t) relevant to ethics, and _The Honor Code_, about moral change. Are those books taught regularly? I don’t know – as noted, in my current job I don’t get to teach classes where they’d be relevant, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were used a fair amount, as they are very good for what they try to do.
thanks, never sure how far these things can take us beyond what say sociology of race can offer in terms of descriptions, on the more prescriptive side I think there is a reason folks like Appiah and Sandel do well on the punditry circuit.
Both Appiah and Sandel are very able public speakers, for sure, and able to present complex ideas in ways that are interesting and at least semi-understandable to larger audiences. (I think the first time I actually heard Sandel speak was on a segment on NPR that I just happened to turn on in the car, about Rawls. I was really surprised that someone on the radio was explaining his basic ideas so clearly – and then even more surprised when it turned out to be Sandel, who is, of course, hostile to many of Rawls’s views.)
But, having read a pretty good deal of both of them, I’d say that Appiah’s work is deeper and of more interest philosophically. In my experience he’s also excellent in discussion and conversation, quickly picking up on important points and bringing them out, even when the topic isn’t in his main area of work. I don’t doubt he’s a highly valued colleague for that reason, among others.
Congratulations Anthony!
In addition to teaching, and learning from, his outstanding scholarly writings, I enjoy the the judicious Ethicist column.