Kwame Anthony Appiah famous quotes

03-25-2025

I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Philosophy #Philosophical #Thinking
A value is like a fax machine: itâ€™s not much use if youâ€™re the only one who has one.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Fax #Machines #Use
In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Games #Play #Challenges
Conversations...begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. So I'm using the word 'conversation' not only for literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and ideas of others. And I stress the role of the imagination here because the encounters, properly conducted, are valuable in themselves. Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Art #Stress #Ideas
Conversation doesnâ€™t have to lead to consensus about anything especially not values; itâ€™s enough that it helps people get used to one another
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#People #Helping #Enough
The phrase 'academic freedom' is often used carelessly: here is a work that will allow a more careful conversation about those many crucial issues facing the academy, in which a well-worked out understanding of conceptions of academic freedom is, as its authors show, an essential tool.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Issues #Understanding #Essentials
The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Heart #Ideas #Long
If someone hates you, they won't ask you for things.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Hate #Generosity #Hate You
Conversation doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#People #Helping #Enough
The version of cosmopolitanism that I favor is exactly about balancing universality and difference. Many people who believe rightly in universality, want, wrongly, I think, to impose their vision of the world on others. They think not just that there are universal truths but that they already know what they are. And they don't think they have anything to learn, as a result, from others. They don't converse, they try to convert.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Believe #Thinking #People
Cosmopolitans begin, I think, with a sense of one thing we all certainly share, which is our fallibility. Nobody has reason to be confident that they're right about everything. That's one of the motivations for conversation across differences. It's in my interest to converse with people who are wrong about different things from the ones I'm wrong about!
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Motivation #Thinking #People
I believe there are universal moral values - some of which are very well served by a cosmopolitan attitude. You can think that there are universal values without supposing that everyone agrees as to what they are and without supposing that you have got them all right either.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Attitude #Believe #Thinking
There are many agreements across the so-called "world religions," at a certain level of abstraction. But when it comes to applying them in concrete situations they may lead to incompatible decisions. As an example, some people think that Christian ideas of sexual modesty suggest that homosexuals should be locked up, some people think that they mean that the churches should recongize gay marriages. But everyone believes in sexual modesty. I think there are universal moral truths, whether or not everyone accepts them. Here's one very low level but important one: it's very bad to torture people.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Christian #Believe #Mean
We can't literally talk with everybody else on the planet or even with representatives of every group. But we can be in favor of the respectful exchange of ideas in ways that don't presuppose that all the right answers are on our own side. Still, we should all have moral bottom lines. Once genocide or torture begins the priority shifts from understanding to stopping it. One hope I have for the global conversation as instantiated in human rights treaties is that we are slowly coming to consensus on certain moral baselines.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Priorities #Understanding #Moral
I favor a form of cosmopolitanism that takes nations very seriously, particularly because of the role of national law in sustaining or, unfortunately, undermining human rights. Some cosmopolitans take the metaphor of global citizenship - the etymology of the word, after all, just comes from a Greek phrase meaning citizen of the world - to rule out taking national citizenship seriously. I think that's a big mistake. Why can't I be loyal to America and to humanity? After all, I can be loyal to America and to New York city!
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Mistake #Thinking #Greek
I've long had the idea that the factors that are most important in determining what we believe, how we live, and what we accomplish are matters of accident. That is, we did not choose where to be born, who our parents would be, or what we would look like. Yet those factors play an enormous role in almost everything about is. W/regard to issues of cosmopolitanism, the most obvious point is that how we identify ourselves in terms of nationality, cultural subgroups, and religion are all pretty much a function of where we were born.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Believe #Long #Parent
There are many people of cosmopolitan temperament who are not from the elites of their societies or the world; and while, for a variety of reasons, I think a cosmopolitan spirit does naturally go with city life, that's the life of a very large proportion of human beings today. And I don't think rural people can't be cosmopolitan, in my sense.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Thinking #People #World
Plenty of people within the Moslem world are not engaged in a clash with te West and don't want to do so; and none of the terrorist acts was an attack by the Moslem world on the West. They were attacks by particular groups of Moslems on particular Western individuals or nations. If we allow ourselves to de driven to thinking of every Moslem as an enemy or every Westerner as a friend, for that matter in these circumstances, we'll have no basis for moving forward.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Moving #Thinking #People
Unless you have the power to stop the government of Iran beheading teenagers for homosexual acts, there's not much to be done except deplore it unless you are willing to converse with people about why they thinking this is okay.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah

#Teenager #Thinking #People

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