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Kwame Anthony Appiah

British-Ghanaian philosopher and cultural theorist, Professor of Philosophy and Law at NYU and author of The Honor Code and Cosmopolitanism.

5 books on the record · 21 Nov 2012 – 21 Nov 2012 · @KAnthonyAppiah

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

recommends it

Honor by Frank Henderson Stewart

I disagree with a lot of what he says – in particular that he wants to give up on honour because it has such negative connotations: I think it needs reform as a concept – but I think it's a very lovely piece of scholarly analysis.

on fivebooks.com · 21 Nov 2012

recommends it

In the Name of Honor by Mukhtar Mai

She is one of my heroes and this is a book about how someone who grasps dignity, which is a form of honour based in our humanity, can resist the world of the negative side of honour, where women are punished because they are pawns in a game of honour between men.

on fivebooks.com · 21 Nov 2012

recommends it

Moral Capital by Christopher Leslie Brown

This is another beautiful piece of scholarship by an eminent historian, but you don't have to be an academic to read it. It's about a really interesting subject that I think would interest anybody.

on fivebooks.com · 21 Nov 2012

loved it

The Duel and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov

It's just so marvellous, the description of these professional-class Russians, far, far away from Moscow in the provinces, and their preoccupation with status and all that, and these two guys in a completely pointless duel.

on fivebooks.com · 21 Nov 2012

recommends it

The Economy of Esteem by Geoffrey Brennan & Philip Pettit

This is a book by a philosopher and an economist about a topic that was neglected for a very long time in social analysis. So there's lots about it in the 18th century – Adam Smith and people like that – and it's about how esteem, which is their word for the respect that you give to people who have achieved things against a certain standard, can be used to motivate people to do good things.

on fivebooks.com · 21 Nov 2012

Everything Kwame Anthony Appiah recommends — not just books — on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.