BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Urging students and others in the audience to view a subtitled film each month as one way to better understand global cultural identities, Ghanaian-British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah delivered the featured address at the annual President’s Convocation at Illinois Wesleyan’s Westbrook Auditorium Aug. 31.
Named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 global thinkers in 2010, Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His speech highlighted the University’s Summer Reading Program, which gives incoming students, faculty and staff an opportunity to participate in a shared intellectual experience through discussions. This year, the new students explored issues related to diversity with the 2011 Summer Reading Program selection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of story stories.
In his speech, Appiah related his central theme of cosmopolitanism — the philosophy that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community — to Lahiri’s book, to the teachings of ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes and to his own multicultural heritage.