Photo Credit: Dan Turello/Library of Congress
In awarding the 2026 honorary degrees, President Maurie McInnis read the following personalized citation.
Distinguished philosopher, cultural historian, novelist, and New York Times ethicist, your unflinching but generous spirited work has demonstrated that ideas of nationality, religion, and tradition are not walls that divide us but starting points for conversation. Equally at home in scholarship, criticism, fiction writing, and public discourse, you have given depth to a simple but demanding idea: that we are citizens not only of our nations or communities but of a shared human world. Teacher at many institutions, including Yale, and now New York University, you have inspired generations of students to think with clarity and independence.
Cosmopolitan cartographer, whose work has enlarged our moral vocabulary while insisting on its human scale, we are pleased and honored to award you the degree of Doctor of Humanities.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is a distinguished philosopher, cultural theorist, and writer renowned for his contributions to ethics and political philosophy, African and African American studies, and the philosophy of culture. Appiah’s multidisciplinary approach bridges diverse fields, advancing the understanding of identity, cosmopolitanism, and the ethics of race and cultural studies. He is a Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, and has held positions at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton University.
Born in 1954 to Peggy Cripps Appiah, an English children’s book author, and Joseph Appiah, a Ghanaian lawyer, diplomat, and politician, Appiah received his early education in Kumasi, Ghana. After his father, who had helped found an opposition party, became a political prisoner, an international campaign led by Amnesty International resulted in his eventual release, and he went on to serve Ghana in many ways, including as president of the Ghana Bar Association and as Ghana’s representative at the United Nations. Appiah’s mother, meanwhile, helped introduce West African folklore into children’s literature. He entered Clare College, Cambridge, to study medicine, but shifted to philosophy, and his first teaching job was at the University of Ghana at Legon. His father had encouraged Appiah and his siblings to “remember you are citizens of the world.”
While he was completing his doctorate at Cambridge—an account of probabilistic semantics drawing on cognitive science—an intriguing opportunity arose: a joint faculty appointment at Yale University. Encouraged by his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., ’73 BA, whom he met at Cambridge, he joined Yale’s Departments of Philosophy and of African and African American Studies (now Black Studies), applying philosophical methods to an interdisciplinary field. Appiah and Gates collaborated on several projects, including the Africana, a major reference work on African and African American culture.
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As director of undergraduate studies at Yale, and later at Harvard, Appiah fostered a multidisciplinary approach that has become a model in academia. His influential works, such as In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture and The Ethics of Identity, reflect his profound engagement with complex philosophical and cultural questions. His scholarship has been instrumental in broadening the dialogue on identity, ethics, and cosmopolitanism, shaping both academic and public discourse.
Appiah has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations in 2007, the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2012, an honorary degree from the University of Cambridge in 2022, and most recently the Kluge Prize of the Library of Congress. Formerly president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, and of the Modern Language Association, he currently serves as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His contributions extend beyond academia into public philosophy. As a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, his The Ethicist column has, for a decade, addressed ethical dilemmas faced by everyday individuals, making philosophy accessible and relevant to a broader audience. Appiah’s journey has been deeply enriched by his husband, New Yorker editorial director Henry Finder ’86 BA, whose influence he acknowledges in making everything he does better.
