Philosophy Department Announces 2004 Hourani Lectures in Moral Philosophy

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo Department of Philosophy has announced that Kwame Anthony Appiah will deliver the department's annual George H. Hourani lectures in moral philosophy.

Appiah, an Asante native of southern Ghana, is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Appiah's family stretches around the globe and he draws on his rich cultural roots to address issues of diversity, community building, and cultural identity. He is internationally recognized for his writings on mind and language, African and African-American intellectual history and political philosophy.

For the Hourani series, he will address "The Ethics of Identity" in six lectures to be held in the Center for Tomorrow on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

All lectures in the series will be free and open to the public, and each will take place at 4 p.m. on the following dates: Sept. 27, "The Ethics of Individuality;" Sept. 28, "Autonomy and Its Critics;" Sept. 29, "The Demands of Identity;" Oct. 19, "The Trouble with Culture;" October 20: "Soul-making," and Oct. 21, "Rooted Cosmopolitanism."

Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2002, Appia was the Charles H. Carswell Professor of Afro-American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he specialized in moral and political philosophy, African and African-American studies, literary theory and criticism, and issues of personal and political identity, multiculturalism and nationalism.

He joined the Harvard faculty in 1991, after holding faculty positions at Duke, Cornell and Yale universities.

His writings include numerous scholarly books, essays and articles, along with reviews, short fiction, three novels and a volume of poetry. With Princeton Provost Amy Gutmann, Appiah wrote "Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race" (Princeton University Press, 1996), which won the Annual Book Award of the North American Society for Social Philosophy, the Ralph J. Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association and the Gustavus Myers Award for the Study of Human Rights.

His much-praised book, "In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture" (Oxford University Press, 1992), has been honored by the African Studies Association, the Cleveland Foundation and the Modern Language Association.

Appiah is co-editor, with Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., of the 3,000-article "Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience," and of the "Encarta Africana CD-ROM." His most recent projects are a second set of Tanner Lectures in Human Values, a lecture series presented by several universities around the world, and an annotated collection of proverbs from his native Asante culture upon which he collaborated with his mother.

Appiah received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at Clare College, Cambridge University.