Appiah has been professor of philosophy and law at New York University since 2014. Before that, he was in the philosophy department at Princeton from 2002 to 2013, when he wrote Cosmopolitanism. Appiah’s father was a political leader from Ghana, and his mother was English; their interracial marriage was said to be one of the inspirations for the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Appiah spent his childhood in Kumasi, in Ghana, but attended school in the UK and went on to attend Cambridge University.

Appiah and his husband, Henry Finder, live in the New York area. Since 2015, Appiah has written the Ethicist column for the New York Times magazine, answering readers’ questions about ethical concerns. He lectures regularly around the world.

Joseph Emmanuel Appiah, the author’s father and a political leader from Kumasi, Ghana, figures prominently throughout the text. Joseph Appiah was, in the late 1970s, Ghana’s representative to the United Nations. In the Introduction, Appiah emphasizes his father’s cosmopolitan qualities, sharing that he wrote to his children to “[r]emember you are citizens of the world” (xviii). Joseph Appiah died in 1990 before Cosmopolitanism was published, and Appiah often refers to his father’s personal history as a source of examples and anecdotes.