The Mary Flexner Lectureship: 2005 Lecturer Anthony Appiah

Renowned philosopher and Africana-studies scholar K. Anthony Appiah, one of the world's leading theorists of identity, race and culture, delivered the 2005 Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College on four Thursdays in October and November. The overarching theme of the series was "The End of Ethics?" with individual lectures titled "Experimental Ethics," "The Case Against Character," "The Case Against Intuition," and "The Ends of Ethics." 

Appiah, Princeton University 's Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and director of Princeton's University Center for Human Values, is the son of an English mother and a Ghanaian father. Born in London, he was raised primarily in Ghana and educated at Cambridge University and has since the early 1980s lived in the United States.  He served on the faculties of Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard Universities before taking a post at Princeton.

Trained as a philosopher of language and logic, Appiah has substantial publications in the relatively arcane field of probabilistic semantics, but he is better known for his work on questions of race, multiculturalism and identity. His most famous book, In My Father's House, became an instant classic upon its publication in 1992 and is one of the most-assigned books on African-studies reading lists; its trenchant critique of the concept of race has been so widely cited that it has become virtually canonical in the humanities.