Kwame Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers is a brilliant and lucid book that attempts to make a case for shared values in our increasingly fragmented world. Appiah was trained as an analytic and moral philosopher, but he also wrote the foundational text on African philosophy that has been part of the movement to get away from the narrow confines of traditional continental philosophy.
Personally Appiah is the son of a Ghanian father and an English mother. He incorporates his own biography into the text to show how contingent knowledge can be. He also writes about tricky issues regarding cultural patrimony, national traditions, and global ethics. With the exception of one chapter that is rather heavy on an exposition of logical positivism, Appiah's book is not for specialists or academics. I taught this book to several classes of students and they loved it.
Czar
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