The Seeley G. Mudd Library is honored to welcome Kwame Anthony Appiah to campus for his convocation entitled “A Decent Respect: Honor and Citizenship at Home and Abroad,” on Tuesday, February 17 at 11:10 am in Memorial Chapel. He is often called a postmodern Socrates, and for good reason; he asks probing questions about identity, ethnicity, honor, and religion during a time when these difficult notions continue to shift. Exciting and erudite, Appiah challenges us to look beyond the boundaries—real and imagined—that divide us, and to celebrate our common humanity. You will not want to miss this important convocation!
Of course, being librarians, we encourage you to learn more about this great thinker before he arrives on campus. You can read his biography here.
Many of Appiah’s works are available for check-out in the Mudd, and can be found by doing an author search in our catalog. These works include:
- Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
- The Ethics of Identity
- Experiments in Ethics
- The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen
- In My Father’s House: Africa and the Philosophy of Culture
Kwame Anthony Appiah is also featured in the film Examined Life, which attests that “philosophy is in the streets” and can be found on DVD in our media collection. He helped to edit The Dictionary of Global Culture that is shelved in our reference collection, as well as the Critical Perspectives Past and Present series, featuring authors such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston. These works are all located on the third floor. The book Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, is an electronic resource that can be found here after logging in on the library’s home page.
We invite you to take full advantage of the many resources available in the Mudd, and to take some time exploring and engaging with Appiah’s work before he arrives. We are certainly looking forward to hearing his convocation address, and hope to see many of you there. Meanwhile, here’s a Ted Talk by the philosopher given in May, 2014:
See you at Convocation!