TANS LECTURE

Who we are: Identity and the Good Life

TUES 5 NOVEMBER, 20.00
Franz Palm lecture hall, Tongersestraat 53      

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Professor of Philosophy and Law, New York University

Essentially, ethics is about what it is for a person to do well the one thing we are all doing, which is making a human life. In doing so, there are many things we must keep in mind. We have, for example, general moral duties to others, relationships that impose special demands on us and projects to which we are committed. But among the resources that enable and constrain our life-making are our social identities — including our gender, sexuality, class, nationality, race, ethnicity and profession. In this lecture, Kwame Anthony Appiah will sketch a picture of what these identities have in common and explore some of the ways they matter for ethics.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-American philosopher and writer who has written about political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah taught at the University of Ghana, Cornell, Yale and Harvard. He was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Since 2014, he has been Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Appiah was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2022.

The Tans Lecture is organised every year to honour Dr. J. Tans (1912-1993), the founding father of Maastricht University.