The inaugural Gates Lecture: Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah

Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah will deliver the inaugural Gates Lecture, entitled "Misreading Fanon - How a thinker of division became a prophet of certainty". He will then be joined by Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr and Provost Gillian Tett for a Q&A.

About our speaker:

Kwame Anthony Appiah has worked in many areas of philosophy and literary and cultural studies, beginning with doctoral work in the theory of meaning, where he developed an account of the probabilistic semantics of conditionals. Since then, he has explored the intellectual history of modern African ideas about race, culture and identity, done work on the nature of social identities and their role in ethical life, and explored questions about global ethics, defending a 'rooted cosmopolitanism.'

He has sought to bring philosophical ideas to a wider audience in books like Cosmopolitanism and The Honor Code (which discusses the role of honor in bringing about moral change).

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, Laurance Rockefeller University Professor Emeritus at Princeton, an honorary fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2012.

With thanks to Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr for supporting this inaugural lecture