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142Color Conscious: The Political Morality of RacePrinceton University Press. 1996.In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice--whether through "color-blind" policies or through affirmative action--provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In Color Conscious, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful, their essays tackle different aspects of the question of racial justice; together …Read more
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232Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood ConnectionsThe Tanner Lectures on Human Values 17 51-136. 1996.
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14Old Gods, New Worlds: Some Recent Work in the Philosophy of African Traditional ReligionIn Guttorm Fløistad (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey - Vol. 5: African Philosophy, Martinus Nijhoff. pp. 207-234. 1987.
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9In defence of honourThe Philosophers' Magazine 53 22-31. 2011.The object of the exercise is to understand what we can do to stop something bad. It would be better if people stopped for the purest of motives, but it’s best if they stop. And if the choice is between their stopping for the wrong reasons and their not stopping I favour their stopping for the wrong reasons. Kant may be right that people ought to stop killing because they see that it’s wrong. That ought to be enough, but it may not be, and if it isn’t, if there’s something else that can actually…Read more
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3Liberalism and the Plurality of IdentityIn N. Cloete, M. W. Makgoba & D. Ekong (eds.), Knowledge, Identity and Curriculum Transformation in Africa, Maskew Miller Longman. pp. 79-99. 1997.
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7The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of RaceIn Henry Louis Gates Jr (ed.), Race, Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press. pp. 21--37. 1986.
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2Social Forces, 'Natural' KindsIn Abebe Zegeye, Leonard Harris & Julia Maxted (eds.), Exploitation and Exclusion: Race and Class in Contemporary Us Society, Hans Zell. pp. 1-13. 1992.
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1An Aesthetics for Adornment in Some African CulturesIn Marie-Thérèse Brincard (ed.), Beauty by Design: The Aesthetics of African Adornment, African-american Institute. pp. 15-19. 1984.
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422“Group Rights” and Racial Affirmative ActionThe Journal of Ethics 15 (3): 265-280. 2011.This article argues against the view that affirmative action is wrong because it involves assigning group rights. First, affirmative action does not have to proceed by assigning rights at all. Second, there are, in fact, legitimate “group rights” both legal and moral; there are collective rights—which are exercised by groups—and membership rights—which are rights people have in virtue of group membership. Third, there are continuing harms that people suffer as blacks and claims to remediation fo…Read more
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4Ethnophilosophy and Its CriticsIn P. H. Coetzee & A. J. P. Roux (eds.), Philosophy from Africa: A text with readings 2nd Edition, Routledge. 1998.
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10African Philosophy and African LiteratureIn Kwasi Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 538--548. 2004.
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745African IdentitiesIn Bernard Boxill (ed.), Constructions Identitaires: Questionnements Theoriques Et Etudes de Cas. Actes du Celat 6 (May), Universite Laval. 1992.
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19As If: Idealization and IdealsHarvard University Press. 2017.Idealization is a fundamental feature of human thought. We build simplified models in our scientific research and utopias in our political imaginations. Concepts like belief, desire, reason, and justice are bound up with idealizations and ideals. Life is a constant adjustment between the models we make and the realities we encounter. In idealizing, we proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. This is not a dangerous or distracting occupation, Kwame Anthony Appiah…Read more
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2Ethnic Identity as a Political ResourceIn Teodros Kiros (ed.), Explorations in African Political Thought: Identity and Community, Routledge. pp. 45-54. 2001.
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167Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of StrangersW.W. Norton & Co. 2006.A political and philosophical manifesto considers the ramifications of a world in which Western society is divided from other cultures, evaluating the limited capacity of differentiating societies as compared to the power of a united world.
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152. A Measure of Belief: Lessons from Frank RamseyIn As If: Idealization and Ideals, Harvard University Press. pp. 57-111. 2017.
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917Xv*—how to decide if races existProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (3): 363-380. 2006.Through most of the twentieth century, life scientists grew increasingly sceptical of the biological significance of folk classifications of people by race. New work on the human genome has raised the possibility of a resurgence of scientific interest in human races. This paper aims to show that the racial sceptics are right, while also granting that biological information associated with racial categories may be useful
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6Buying Freedom: The Ethics and Economics of Slave Redemption (edited book)Princeton University Press. 2007.If "slavery" is defined broadly to include bonded child labor and forced prostitution, there are upward of 25 million slaves in the world today. Individuals and groups are freeing some slaves by buying them from their enslavers. But slave redemption is as controversial today as it was in pre-Civil War America. In Buying Freedom, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl bring together economists, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers for the first comprehensive examination of the practical a…Read more
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69Editors' Introduction: Multiplying IdentitiesCritical Inquiry 18 (4): 625-629. 1992.A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry’s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, ”Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt …Read more
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Are We Ethnic? The Theory and Practice of American PluralismBlack American Literature Forum 20 209-24. 1986.
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