Kwame Anthony Appiah: belief

Transcript context

…Some questions about philosophy. Just sort of standing on one foot briefly, how would you position yourself in the philosophic canon? I think of myself as someone whose main contribution is to notice things of interest in philosophical work and draw them to the attention of a public that’s wider than the public that already knows about them, the philosophical world that already knows about them. Also, I happened to be in a place and a time, in the early ’80s in New Haven, Connecticut, at Yale, where there was a possibility of making a kind of connection between analytic philosophy — the kind of philosophy I was trained in — and questions in African and African-American studies. To the extent that there is a subfield of African-American studies that’s philosophical, I think I can claim to have more or less started it. Of course there are ancestors like Du Bois, but in terms of thinking about how a philosophical training should be brought to bear in thinking about African-American stuff, I definitely was one of the first people to. I think I had the first appointment in philosophy in African-American studies in the world, and that was luck. It was Yale that thought of making that appointment. I didn’t invent the job, but it gave me a challenge: How can you take this training you’ve had, which has nothing at all to do with race or gender or sexual orientation or anything else — how can you take that and bring it to bear in thinking about things that are central to African-American studies? I’m really lucky that I was faced with that question, just as a teacher, because I had to teach things. I had to teach philosophy courses in African-American studies. I was really lucky, and it was sort of obvious that there was lots of material that could be brought to bear, so to the extent that I have a tiny place in the history of the subject, it’s probably in that intersection. How can we bring more diversity — racial and otherwise — to philosophy? What concretely should we do?…

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