YouSaid · the spoken record

Kwame Anthony Appiah

lines on the record: 83
first: 2019-07-31
most recent: 2019-07-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Hold on to the thing that should have brought you in in the first place, which is your own desire to understand things. I'm always... In the end what I'm doing, even when I'm answering those questions, is figuring out what I think, which is the only way I know how to make a contribution, is just to figure out the best answer you can come up with in the available time to the question that presents itself to you. And the questions that in philosophy that present themselves to me seem very urgent to me, even if some of them have answers that are for the ages. And I'm mostly working on them because I want to know the answer myself.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That work is very important too. That sort of work, the work that isn't easily explained to the rest of the world, is in the background of the work that does get explained more widely. So I feel very much, as it were, standing on the shoulders of perhaps not giants, but anyway, pretty large people who are not visible outside the subject, but without his work. In other words, the work is the product of the community of scholars, and you're just one tiny proboscis on that vast amoeba of philosophy. And there's stuff right in the middle. There's the nucleus, and in there people are doing things that nobody's ever going to be able to figure out outside the amoeba itself. Don't look for any particular kind of impact. Do the best work you can.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any kind of impact? I just was interested in the subject and wanted to do more, wanted to write more, wanted to think more, wanted to teach more. I think that too much reflection on the kind of effects of your work as opposed to just on the work itself is probably not a good idea. You should just do it and hope that it will have uptake. And the final thing I'll say is that there are many, many kinds of uptake. So there are people whose uptake is almost entirely within professional philosophy who are doing wonderful, important work which will never be explained probably to people outside because there are things you need to know, modal logic or tensor calculus or something if you're a philosopher of physics that aren't ever going to be explained to everybody.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I realized that I really loved philosophy, but I didn't become a philosophy undergraduate because I thought I was going to be a philosophy graduate sooner. I became a philosophy undergraduate because I wanted to do more philosophy and then I was going to go home and figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I went home, spent a year in Ghana, and the job I got was teaching philosophy at the University of Ghana. That made me realize that I liked the teaching, which I hadn't done before, obviously, as an undergraduate and so on. I would say be prepared to discover what's both in you and out there in the world. Don't have some picture of how you want it to happen because that isn't very, that's very unlikely to work. Be attentive to the world around you. Be attentive to what you discover about yourself as you go along. Match the two together. I didn't set out to make it.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what I say is life. Is not the kind of thing you can plan You can't have a sort of life plan which is the term some ethicists use in your back pocket I was a medical student when I went to university I was going to be a doctor till I was 20.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is because of its function for the readers. What the booker does is it creates a conversation in England over the summer about 13 books. And then people get really excited about which six are going to be picked. And there's another conversation about the six, including conversations in which people say that the Chinese are idiots and they miss something important, which is good because that comes into the conversation too. And then the winner. And again, all over England, people are talking about this book. And people who wouldn't have read it read it. And since it's a great book, that's a good outcome.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm the chair of the prize committee for the Bagruin Prize, which is a philosophy prize, which is a million dollars a year. Which tends to go to people who've had a long career like Charles Taylor, right? Like Charles Taylor or Martha Nusban, people who, well, people who started doing what they were doing long before there were any prizes, so it can't have motivated them. So I think certainly for the booker, the reason I agreed to do it, and it involved flying to London once a month and a lot of stress and reading all those novels.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and sometimes it reads like it. I think literary fiction is not written by people who are looking for fame and fortune. The author of Milkman, she was living in a small apartment, didn't have very much money, when asked what she would do with the prize money, she said, pay off my debts. Anna Burns has a vocation to write these novels. She writes them in a very particular way. She says they come to her. She waits for them, and then she writes stuff down. Sometimes she knows it's working and sometimes it isn't and so on. She has a very particular picture of what she's up to. I don't think people like that are motivated by anything like this. But it doesn't mean there isn't anybody who's motivated in that way. I think that recognition is part of the important structure of the literary world and prizes, big and small, are an important part of that. I don't think they're unimportant. I think it's good to do them. I'm not a big fan of...”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think anybody writes a book because they might get a literary prize. I don't think that wouldn't be a good enough reason to write a novel.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are architects or designers who actually visit the sites, but they produce very extensive reports. So we picked the finalists, the 20-something finalists, by looking at portfolios. And then there's a presentation of each building over a series of days and so on. And that's how the choices are made.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but still, we felt, the judges felt, that we owed it to these people to read them right through, so we did. And I wouldn't urge, you're reading very, very fast because you've got less than a year and you've got to read all these books. And you are reading with a question in mind, which is not the question you normally have in mind when you read a novel, which is, is this worthy of this prize? And it's a funny frame of mind. One of the good things about it is that there's a, so you read 173, then you make a long list of 13. And those you can then read again at a reasonable rate in the last part of the summer. And then once you've picked the six, you get to read those again. So the finalists you've read three times, and the last two times you've read them at a reasonable rate. So you've read them in a sort of normal way. But there are books that I read for that that I'm going to read again because I didn't feel I read them properly.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think they were, I don't think you should read levels in the way you have to read them for that purpose because I did read them all. I mean, that is to say I read every page of almost all, well, I lie. I did not read every page of one of them, which was.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, so for example, the column, I almost always work on the column at the weekend in the living room of our house in New Jersey. Work for six or seven hours, maybe just with a laptop and the questions and vocational cups of coffee. And that's kind of a very productive space for me. I get that done in that way. Here in New York, I almost never get anything done in either of my offices. I have an office in the law school and an office in the philosophy department. But in this very room too, I also sometimes sit with my laptop. And again, I can sit for six or seven hours and write things. I almost actually almost never done a column in this space for some reason. So that's usually writing lectures or articles or reviews. I have a beautiful study in New Jersey and I've never managed to write a single word in it. It somehow doesn't work for me. I have a lovely desk and I'm surrounded by a lovely library of books and there's a fireplace and so on but it just doesn't work. The place that works is sitting in a living room with a laptop on my”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learn that it is possible to be a happy creature that doesn't know about Donald Trump and doesn't worry about the fate of the world. My sheep are, we feed them properly and they have access to water and they can run around and there are no big dogs to scare them or wolves or anything like that, no predators, and their lives seem happy. And when I'm visiting them, I sort of feel that you can, I'm reminded of the possibility of a kind of untroubled existence.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alas, no, he died before I was born. In fact, he died before my parents were married. My mother always said about him that because he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain and in charge of a period of austerity after the war, that everybody always had this image of him as this kind of austere and figure incapable of enjoyment. But in fact, she said he had lots of fun. Churchill picked up on this way of thinking about my grandfather when he said there but for the grace of God goes God, he said about my grandfather. He was very religious, he was very pious, but he wasn't humorless. And I think people got the impression that he was.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So while it was also the case that somehow being invested with this job made him seem a little bit magical still, he was still fundamentally just my uncle Matthew”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had both because my great uncle was succeeded by my uncle. They're very different to me because my great-uncle was this incredible charismatic symbol of Asantiness, and we would sometimes go up and see him with my mother and my sisters on a Sunday after church. We would just go and sit and chat to him. But he was, it wasn't like sort of chatting with a member of the family. He was a very grand figure. He was always dressed in these amazing as anti-Kente robes. So that was kind of exciting. And you were awed by him. The next king of Santimai, who had been whom I knew as a child, as Uncle Matthew before he became king, was someone, you know, when I was a kid, I hung out with him, I walked around. We walked around hand in hand when I was a kid and so on. I knew him very intimately.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, of course, the Queen in hospitals tend to ask this slightly daft question, which is how are you? And the answer should always be, well, I'm in hospital. But of course, I said I was very well. The thing that got me in trouble was that when the Duke of Edinburgh, who had visited my hometown, Kamasi, without the Queen previously and had met my mother, turned around as he was leaving and said, give my regards to your mother, which is a conventional thing for members of the Royal family to say, but to somebody they met before. And that got, at that point, the president realized that he knew who I was.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he was still the president of our country. And it was very exciting to have him there. And I was kind of upset that he was with the Queen of England and she greeted me and he didn't. And I was kind of upset that he didn't say hello, since, you know, he'd been a very close friend of my parents. He was going to be the best man at their wedding when he became leader of government business in Ghana, so he sent somebody else. So they'd been very close. So even though he was my father's imprisoner, I think I remember feeling that he should have not tapped his foot and looked at the ceiling, which is basically what he did”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do remember. What was that last? I was recovering at that point. That was very exciting. I knew he'd put my father in prison.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't remember my childhood. I got very, very sick when I was eight and spent several months in hospital. And I have zero memories of anything before that, unfortunately.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are people who would respond to a change like that by sort of nosily poking about in other people's lives. And I think there's a place for moral privacy as well. So I think like all these things, it's likely to go too far at some point.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It continues. Well, I think a lot of there'll be a lot more what are now called bystander interventions in social life. That will mean that probably there'll be a lot less, I think, sexual and racial and homophobic harassment because bystanders are very useful in dealing with that kind of thing. That will be good. I mean, a lot of people now witness those kinds of things and they think it's wrong, but they don't say anything because we have this idea that, as I said, that everybody's responsible for their own moral life kind of thing. So if that were to take off, it would be a big change. It would have downsides as well as upsides, as these changes often do because there's a reason why in the Muslim case, the tradition says that while you should do this, you shouldn't, for example, be too nosy about what other people are doing because then the balance would shift too far in the other direction.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I should have a standard answer to that, but I don't. I think that we're seeing that there's a long tradition in Muslim moral thought of making each of us, at least each Muslim, responsible for the moral lives of other Muslims in a certain way. It refers to a passage in the Quran about commanding right and forbidding wrong. I think this society was, when I came here 30-something years ago, very much a society in which people sort of thought that you left other people to do their own moral thing, and that now there's an interesting change going on that people feel inclined to sort of intervene in the moral lives of even of strangers, and to say what they think about it, maybe not to coerce them, of course, into doing anything in particular, but at least to express a view.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Breakfast table. C, he agrees with me, all that gets hidden away because I don't agree with you and you don't want your whoever it is you're arguing with to know that the Times ethicist has taken their side. But as I say, I think it's really important that I don't believe that anybody who was in serious difficulty should think of writings at the New York Times and waiting perhaps months for an answer is a sensible way to seek a solution. The main function of the column from my point of view, as I say, is to get out ideas for thinking about the big things that happen in everybody's life, questions about confidentiality, loyalty, and the balancing of interests, whether what difference your relationship with a person makes to what you owe to them, these sorts of things, which I think philosophy has lots to say about and it's useful.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, as I say, I get zero information beyond the letter and perhaps surprisingly people don't often communicate with me or try to communicate with me about what I've said, especially the people who asked the question. So it's possible that it makes people feel bad. But I think what I imagine is that there are many reasons why people write in. One is they just want to, as it were, write it down. They want to think about they've got a problem. They think if I just write out this question, I'll get clearer about what my situation is. And maybe this guy will even help me get a little bit clearer. But I think a lot of them are people who've had an argument with somebody about what they should do, and they want me to take sides. Now, they don't explicitly say that, and they don't tell me what the other side is usually, though occasionally somebody says, well, my wife thinks this and I think that. So I think of sometimes as the function of my answer is to be something that on Sunday morning gets slapped down on the...”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I thought that I was the only resource for the people who were writing the letters, I wouldn't write the column. So I know, I think all I'm trying to do is to identify something in the question that strikes me as worth thinking about, mostly, as I say, not for the person who wrote to me, but for the million other people who are going to read it. I've never had a question where I thought If I answer this with what I think is the best advice I have, there's a risk that something bad will happen. I've never had that happen.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something, but it's helpful to be heard, it's helpful to articulate the problem for yourself. The advice function, the thing that the advisor says may not be hugely important.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the letter writers, of course, I don't give advice that I think will do them any harm, but I'm not usually feeling that the advice I've given them is either A, very different from what they would have done without my advice, or B, really truly satisfactory because if I were in the business of advising as opposed to writing an advice column, which is not being in the business of advising, I would want to know more in almost every case about their situation. If they came to me with the question, the first thing I'd say is tell me more about this, tell me more about that, and so on. But the convention is that the latter is all I get. And while the fact-checkers at the times do call people up to make sure that everything in the letter is true, they don't allow me to ask them questions. So I think that in real life, a lot of the function of advice is actually the one you identified. It's just being a sounding board, it's listening. The person's going to do...”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, honestly, the main thing I think I'm doing in the column is helping everybody except the person who wrote the letter to think about some ethical question, which is for them not likely to be an urgent one in the way it is for the letter writer.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, mattering is a two-place relation. Things matter to somebody. It matters to me, but it wouldn't have mattered to my mother, and I think my mother was a perfectly satisfactory human being for it's not having mattered to her. I mean, she knew that I wrote a book about realism. I'm glad to say she didn't ask me to explain it to her, not because she wasn't smart, but because she wasn't interested.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next stage, I think, at the graduate level, we have a climate committee in our department that thinks all the time about making sure that everything about the climate in the department is not putting off for women, racial minorities, trans people and so on, gay people. Anybody who might, for one reason or another, feel alienated, we spend a lot of our time making sure that we don't do the things that alienate them. Another whole category of people who can be alienated by college experience are people who come from backgrounds where they don't have parents who went to college or who don't have very much money in their background. Interacting with people who do, that can be an unsatisfying or unpleasant experience unless the people that you're interacting with are thoughtful people. So we try as hard as we can to be thoughtful about these things. And I'm saying we do in my department, but all the departments, all the serious departments would be doing this now.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is the place where we're inducing to be more sensible than men. That is, if they get indications that they're in an activity where they're not going to do well, they wisely moved something where they think they will. to resist a little bit and to insist on trying again. That seems to be the evidence. So since it's false that there's some it that people have that makes them successful in philosophy, we should not be communicating this. And so the most important practical thing is to say to all people who teach undergraduate philosophers, don't say that. Explain to them that if they don't do well on their first paper, it's probably because they haven't worked hard enough or they didn't ask enough help from the teacher or the teaching assistants, that if they push on, they're likely to get better. So I think at that stage, that's a really important thing. But then we have to worry about...”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good philosophy. Truth is, as in most things, the good philosophers are people who work hard and who maybe have some psychological shapes, but they're pretty widely distributed in the population. What happens then is that in the first process of developing as a philosopher, you meet these teachers who explicitly or implicitly communicate the thought that if you don't do well in a paper, it's not their fault. It's because you don't have it.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You might, but I don't think that that's what's going on. I think that, so just on the paid question, philosophers are the best paid of humanity's measures. So if you're going to stick in the humanities and you're just interested in income, you should probably be a philosopher. But obviously you wouldn't commit yourself to a life in philosophy if money was the main thing in your life, the thing you cared about most. So I think they leave because there's some psychological evidence about this. One reason I think, and Sarah Jane Leslie, who's now a dean at Princeton, but she's a philosopher and psychologist has thought about this. One reason is that there's been a tendency in analytic philosophy to treat the question of how people perform early in the subject as an indication of whether they have this thing, this it that can make for God.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the challenge is that, so I don't remember the numbers exactly, but it's something like this. Men and women enter undergraduate philosophy in about the same rates, but women leave faster. And so that by the end of college, there are more males and females in most philosophy majors. And the same thing happens in, so there's about a third, I think. So obviously that means that in graduate school there's probably about a third of women to start with, but again, more of them leave. So clearly we're doing something wrong because it isn't that women are not equally interested in the subject because they arrive.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About African American stuff that I think I definitely was one of the first people. I think I had the first appointment in philosophy in African American studies in the world. And that was luck. I mean, it was Yell that thought of making that appointment. I didn't invent the job, but it made me, 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 essential to African? I'm really lucky that I was faced with that question just as a teacher because I had to teach things and I had to teach philosophy courses in African American studies. I think I was really lucky. And I think that it was sort of obvious that there was lots of material that could be brought to bear. So to the extent that I sort of have a place in the tiny place in the history of the subject, it's probably at that intersection.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I think 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. And to the extent that there is a field of, 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”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the answer is that the best jollop rice in West Africa may not be in either Ghana or Nigeria, but I'll stick with my own preference for Ghanaian. But that's probably just a question of what you're used to. Going to have some next weekend, so I'll be in Ghana. No, no, I'm going to be in England, but my niece, WhatsApp to me. An hour ago and said, I'm going to bring Jalafaris. And I thought, wow, that's cool.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he's much funnier, for one thing. He has a wider range. He's an essayist and a humorist as well as a novelist. In all of those ways, he's a more interesting writer, Harriet Beeter, had a huge influence through one book, a huge and positive influence, which I'm glad about, but as a literary figure, I think Twain is obviously superior”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know it's conventional now to prefer Gwen John, but I still think that the best Augustus John paintings are pretty amazing, and I'm not sure that I think that about anything of Gwen Johnson's.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, she was a very smart woman. She was very engaged with thinking about at that point. I don't know what she thinks about now. She wrote a wonderful senior thesis about Tony Morrison, which I admired.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was a very sentimental film which sought to, it's a bit like the way in which the pyramids figure in Afrocentrism, that is to say, the reality is that Africa did not develop advanced technologies in the remote past and build on them. And I think a fantasy in which they did doesn't really help us to think about Africa's future.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it inspired a lot of the kind of people that you and I would know about. But if you want to know what's really... Kind of being consumed by mass publics in Africa. I don't know that Afrofuturism would count as save.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think because it's meant to be for the moment it's not meant to be constructed with the kind of care and detail that goes into making the kinds of works that endure.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well then that's any indication. Well, then that's terrific because I think that kind of highlight was one of Ghana's great contributions to cosmopolitan global culture.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't know. I haven't asked anybody about him in Ghana recently. I hope he's not underrated. He's one of the great Ghanaian treasurers. I certainly think that if he is highly rated, that's perfectly correct.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think philosophers give way more weight to the first critique, and maybe that's right, but not as much more weight than they do.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The stuff on its territory. But it doesn't have special rights to determine what happens to things just because they happen to be on its territory, any more than the Italians have any special right to decide that Etruscan stuff is bad and therefore we're going to not care for it. That would be right. Of course they haven't decided that. But if they were to, it wouldn't be sensible to say, well, because it's in Italy, the Italians are entitled to do what they like with it. They're not.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bit like the situation that there was in Afghanistan under the Taliban. They were as possessors of the Afghan state, trustees of a whole bunch of stuff that they thought of as idols. And some of what they did was destroy stuff because they thought it was idols. Now, fortunately, as a result of the good sense of a lot of curators in Afghanistan who hid stuff from the Taliban, they didn't succeed in destroying as much as they could have. But the thought that the Taliban is in charge of whether we should look after Buddhist material that happens to be in Afghanistan, I think is a mistake. I think, in other words, I really do think of these things as it were, belonging to all of us, humanity. This is the cosmopolitan attitude to these things, and that, of course, states, as with all cosmopolitan obligations, states play a central role in ensuring that they're met. And so they have, each state has responsibility.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source