The Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination's Program on Religion, Diplomacy and International Relations (PORDIR) weekly lunch seminar will feature K. Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, as the guest speaker on Wednesday, March 27, 2013. PORDIR lunches are open to program fellows and invited faculty only.

Kwame Anthony Appiah has published widely in philosophy and in African and African American literary and cultural studies. In 1992, Oxford University Press published In My Father’s House, which deals, in part, with the role of African and African American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. His major current work has to do with the relationships between philosophical ethics and other disciplines. In 1996, he published Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race with Amy Gutmann; in 1997, theDictionary of Global Culture, coedited with Henry Louis Gates Jr. Along with Gates, he has also edited the Encarta Africana cd-rom encyclopedia, published by Microsoft, which developed into Oxford University Press’s five-volume Africana encyclopedia in book form. In 2003, he coauthored Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (of which his mother is the major author), an annotated edition of 7,500 proverbs in Twi, the language of Asante. He is also the author of three novels, of which the first, Avenging Angel, was largely set at Clare College, Cambridge, where he received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. His recent books include Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (2004), The Ethics of Identity (2005), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers(2006), Experiments in Ethics (2008), and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happens (2010).