Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2019

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Born to a Ghanaian father and British mother, Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up splitting time between both countries — and lecturing in many more — before eventually settling in America, where he now teaches philosophy at New York University. This, along with a family scattered across half-a-dozen countries, establishes him as a true cosmopolitan, a label Appiah readily accepts. Yet he insists it is nonetheless possible to be a cosmopolitan patriot, rooted in a place, while having obligations and interests that transcend one’s national identity.

He joins Tyler to discuss this worldly perspective and more, including whether Africa will secularize, Ghanian fallibilism, teaching Jodie Foster, whether museums should repatriate collections, Karl Popper, Lee Kuan Yew, which country has the best jollof rice, the value of writing an ethical advice column, E.T. Mensah, Paul Simon, the experience of reading 173 novels to judge the Man Booker prize, and what he’s learned farming sheep in New Jersey.

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Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded June 12th, 2019

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone, this is Jeff, producer of Conversations with Tyler.
0:07.7	I'm excited to announce that the show is coming to New York City, so I'd like to invite
0:12.0	you to join Tyler and special guest Alain Bertot on September 9th for a live recording
0:17.3	of the podcast.
0:18.6	Come have a drink, meet fellow fans, meet me and the rest of the CWT team, and hear the
0:23.1	conversation Tyler wants to have with Alain Bertot, not the one you want to have.
0:28.0	Now if you don't know Alain Bertot, he wrote one of Tyler's favorite books of the past year,
0:32.3	it's called Order Without Design, How Market Shapes Cities. It draws on over five decades of
0:37.9	Bertot's urban planning expertise in 40 cities across the world. He's one of the most interesting
0:43.2	thinkers in urbanism and what you might call market urbanism today, and we've picked an amazing
0:48.7	venue to have this conversation, it'll be at one world observatory in Manhattan. It's going
0:53.3	to be a great conversation, but space is limited, so please register today, you can find that
0:58.7	link in your show notes, or go to the website ConversationsWithTyler.com. Once again, join us for a
1:05.6	live conversation between Tyler Cowan and Alain Bertot, September 9th, New York City. See you there.
1:11.9	ConversationsWithTyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
1:28.0	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatis.org.
1:34.8	And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates,
1:39.8	visit ConversationsWithTyler.com.
1:51.1	I'm very honored to be here today with Kwame Anthony Apia, and let's just jump right in.
1:56.7	I have some questions about Ghana. Why are there so few atheists in Ghana?
2:02.8	Well, I think maybe for the same reason that there were very few atheists in much of the world,
2:08.3	until relatively recently, I mean, atheism is a relatively modern phenomenon, at least the
	...

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