career ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my friend, kwame anthony appiah, clap. [applause] >> i am half english my mother was english. when people say nice things about you when you are english, you feel embarrassed. [laughter] but i am. [laughter] of but then you also thank them. life thank you very much. i am happy to read on the book if you like but i think i will talk about it. then by the end of yummy to read from that i will but then i think you may want to ask questions. thank you for coming so to explain the book is a talk about the fire was thinking about a book that i wrote years ago looking for examples across societies of moral questions one of the most famous such conversations is a dialogue between christian missionaries elites with men were wise in business and chinese intellectuals talking about foot binding of girls in china i read some literature on that and regulate people say the reason why the chinese mandarins gave up what binding because it was on stage a stain on the national honor of china. i can think of better reasons to not cause inten

[applause] it's my pleasure to introduce kwame anthony appiah. the philosophy of mind and language, african and african-american intellectual history and political philosophy. appiah as a thinker and a writer is as urbane and as warm, as reflective and as accessible, as challenging and as generous as he is as a friend. a premier scholar of contemporary philosophical thought, his work crosses disciplines as it crosses national boundaries and celebrates human rights, ethnic and cultural pluralism, individual identity, intellectual liberty and a sublime mode of cosmopolitanism. let me review just a few of appiah's earlier accomplishments before talking for a moment about his new book with, "the honor code: how moral revolutions happen." educated in ghana and england where we met some 37 years ago at claire college, appiah quickly rose to prominence as a philosopher at the intersection of the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. he is now the lawrence s. rockefeller university professor of of philosophy and the university center for huma