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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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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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68Misunderstanding cultures: Islam and the WestPhilosophy and Social Criticism 38 (4-5): 425-433. 2012.This article aims to explain why the idea of the West is, for historical and philosophical reasons, an obstacle to dealing with the dangers posed by radical Islamists. Every proposed theory of the West has to account for the great internal cultural diversity both of European cultures and of those influenced by them around the world; and every serious historical account both of Europe and of Islam has to recognize the long-standing, substantial and ongoing interdependence of their intellectual an…Read more
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10This book aims to allow readers with no previous exposure to professional philosophy to gain an understanding of the approaches and the positions current in the field and to prepare them for further reading
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1220Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?Critical Inquiry 17 (2): 336-357. 1991.Sara Suleri has written recently, in Meatless Days, of being treated as an "otherness machine"-and of being heartily sick of it.20 Perhaps the predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intellectuals-a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism-we are, indeed, always at the risk of becoming otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role. Our only distinction in the world of texts to which we are latecomers is that we can mediate it to our f…Read more
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171. Useful Untruths: Lessons from Hans VaihingerIn As If: Idealization and Ideals, Harvard University Press. pp. 1-56. 2017.
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42Human Rights as Politics and IdolatryPrinceton University Press. 2001."These essays make a splendid book. Ignatieff's lectures are engaging and vigorous; they also combine some rather striking ideas with savvy perceptions about actual domestic and international politics.
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18As 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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153Cosmopolitanism: 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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142. A Measure of Belief: Lessons from Frank RamseyIn As If: Idealization and Ideals, Harvard University Press. pp. 57-111. 2017.
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865Xv*—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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63Editors' 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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2Inventing an African Practice in Philosophy: Epistemological Issues.”In V. Y. Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Presence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness 1947-1987, University of Chicago. pp. 227-37. 1992.
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20Causes of quarrel: what's special about religious disputesIn Thomas Banchoff (ed.), Religious Pluralism, Globalization and World Politics, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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81Cosmopolitism and Issues of Ethical IdentityJournal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 5 (12): 54-57. 2010.
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6Akan and Euro-American Concepts of the PersonIn Lee M. Brown (ed.), African Philosophy: New and Traditional Perspectives, Oxford University. pp. 21--34. 2004.
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1Identity: Political not CulturalIn Marjorie Garber, Rebecca L. Walkowitz & Paul B. Franklin (eds.), Field Word: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies, Routledge. pp. 34-40. 1997.
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