ROBERT S. BOYNTON: You recently became a U.S. citizen. Why?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: There are very few differences between the things you can do as a resident alien and as a citizen, but I wanted to be able to vote and to be on juries. And I felt that there was a possibility that there would be a backlash against dark-skinned immigrants and it might be difficult to stay here unless one was a citizen.

Q: Your close collaborative friendship with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has been enormously productive for the both of you. What role has Gates had in your intellectual development?

A: Well, for one thing, I wouldn't be in this country if it weren't for Skip Gates. He was a Mellon Fellow - the first black one, I think - at Clare College, Cambridge, which was my college as well, There weren't many brown or black people at Clare - I think there were three of us at the time - and Skip says that people kept asking him whether he'd met me, and that when white people keep asking you that question you can usually assume that the other person is black.

We became very close. He was already living with Sharon, his wife, and I would often go over for dinner. Wole Soyinka was at Cambridge, and the three of us would talk about Pan-African issues. It had never occurred to me to come to the United States before he persuaded me. As a child growing up in a Pan-Africanist household I was aware of people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and if you followed those stories it was natural that one's general impression, on the whole, was that the United States wasn't the best place for a non-white person to be.

Q: Your father was a prominent Ghanaian barrister and politician who was deeply involved in the Pan-African movement. Your mother descended from a prominent British family composed of Fabian socialists and landed gentry. How did they meet?

A: My father was studying law and was the president of the West African Students Union. My mother knew Colin Turnbull, who had founded an organization called Racial Unity, and as the secretary of Racial Unity she met the president of the West African Students Union.

My mother's father was Sir Stafford Cripps, the chancellor of the exchequer in the first postwar government, who helped create the welfare state. Her great-aunt was Beatrice Webb who, with her husband Sidney, founded the London School of Economics, and were leaders of the Labour Party.

Q: I assume interracial couples were rare then. How was their marriage perceived?

A: People say that it was the first British Society interracial wedding, although I don't know whether that is true. My maternal grandmother and grandfather knew the leaders of the colonial empire - Indira Ghandi stayed at their house, etc. - so they were quite familiar with non-English, non-white people from various countries. My grandfather had recently died, and my grandmother told my mother, "Well, if you are going to marry him, you've got to go live in his country and find out what it is like."

So my mother showed up at the Gold Coast (as Ghana was called at the time). My father was a very good friend of Nkrumah's at that point, so my mother found herself in an odd position: the daughter of a British cabinet minister traveling around with all these anticolonial types who were trying to get Britain out of the country. And she couldn't tell anyone why she was there. She came back to England and said it was a lovely country.

My father's family were typical aristocrats, so all they cared about was that she came from a 'good' family - which she did. Once that was explained, they said the marriage was fine with them.

Q: Where were you born?

A: I was born in England and went to Ghana when I was one. I went to primary school in Ghana, and when I was eight Nkrumah threw my father in prison, for reasons that were never entirely clear. It was a difficult time for the family, and I was sick as well. I had toxoplasmosis, which wasn't very well understood at the time, and it took a while to figure out what was wrong. I spent a number of months in the hospital, and at about the time they figured out what I had, the queen of England made her first trip to Ghana.

I was in my hospital bed, and Nkrumah and the queen toured the hospital. Nkrumah didn't speak to me, and as he was leading the queen and the duke of Edinburgh away, the duke turned to me and said, "Do give my regards to your mother," whom he knew. This mightily upset Nkrumah, because the spouse of a visiting head of state was saying nice things about the spouse of someone he had thrown in jail. It was an international incident. My doctor was deported, and the event was on the front page of the British newspapers.

So my mother decided that it was perhaps best for me not to be in Ghana at that point. I was very close to my maternal grandmother in England, so I went to stay with her. And from the age of nine I was at an English boarding school.

Q: How did you decide to attend Cambridge?

A: This is moderately embarrassing, but if you were on the track that I was on at school, you went either to Oxford or Cambridge. I also had a lot of relatives who had gone to Oxford, so going to Cambridge was a way of getting away from them. I intended to be a medical student, and Cambridge is better than Oxford for that. I wanted to be a doctor because I was so infatuated with the doctor who took care of me when I was ill as a child.

Q: So how did you end up studying philosophy?

A: What got me into philosophy was religion: I was an evangelical Christian at the time. We were serious people, so we thought about religion and read theologians like Barth, Bultman, Tillich, etc. So it was in the context of thinking about my faith that I got interested in philosophy. A lot of what I read for myself was philosophy of religion.

I told the philosophy tutor that I had made a terrible mistake and wanted to study philosophy rather than medicine. He told me that I had to finish the term, and gave me a stack of philosophy books to read over the summer. If I still wanted to study philosophy after reading them, it was fine with him. I remember reading Rawls's A Theory of Justice that summer. It was one of the most exhilarating books I had ever read at the time.

Q: What was the dominant school of philosophy at Cambridge at the time?

A: Philosophy of language was the thing, and the big topic was the debate that Michael Dummet had started about "truth conditions and assertability," which was what I wrote my first monograph on. The debate was whether the essential concept in the theory of meaning was assertion or truth.

There was a group that modeled themselves on Wittgenstein, which I thought was quite phony and pretentious. The Wittgenstein world was a world of disciples. For me, philosophy had been about liberating myself, so I was very put off by this.

My teachers were Phillip Petit, Hugh Mellor, Ian Hacking. There was a sort of Cambridge tradition of thinking about probability. I attended the lectures that became Hacking's wonderful book, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?

Q: The philosopher Jonathan Lear was a philosophy student at Clare College at the same time you were. Both of you moved from logic and the philosophy of language to 'softer,' more interpretive forms of philosophy - psychoanalysis in his case, and cultural theory in yours. Any similarities?

A: I think that what was true about Jonathan and myself was that we were intellectuals who became philosophers. We were people of ideas, not people driven by a particular technical agenda.

Q: What then drew you to something as technical as analytic philosophy? What satisfaction do you get from it?

A: There is a certain pleasure in thinking about how things hang together, or coming up with a solution. Although a large part of what I did was either critical or the working out of some details of thoughts that originated with someone else, I did feel that I was making progress; after working through the philosophical problems, I knew that certain strategies in the theory of meaning wouldn't work. There is an ocean of possibilities, and knowing that the truth doesn't lie in that direction is a kind of knowledge. It may be the only kind of knowledge that is available in this area, although perhaps I shouldn't put it in quite that way.

Q: Did you go directly from your undergraduate philosophy studies to your graduate studies?

A: No. When I finished my undergraduate degree, I had no idea what I was going to do next. It hadn't occurred to me to continue studying philosophy. I thought it was something one did at college, and then one went out into the world and got a job. So I went back to Ghana. I packed all my books into a crate, and my mother had bookshelves made for me at home.