Professor Appiah's book on cosmopolitanism was discussed, focusing on the idea of conversation as a way to bridge divides and build relationships across differences, even significant ones. The importance of mutual respect and understanding in facilitating such conversations was highlighted.
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So the fact that they lived together and until my father died and then my mother stayed in Ghana until she died I think that perhaps would have surprised some of the people who were against it at the start but they never seemed to have had any doubt that it was the right thing to do
my kind of Christmas cracker version of my philosophy the thing that I would put on a piece of paper inside a Christmas cracker if I had to is is everything's very complicated everything everything's more complicated than you then you thought at first and it turns out that when you're trying to think about what it is to lead a life of significance what it leads what it is for human life to go well many many things are relevant and in that sense and in that sense it's a very complicated project and so you're not going to realize it's surprising unagrected
the core thought of my cosmopolitanism book is that you have to come together in what I call using them I use the metaphor of conversation and the point about conversation is that it doesn't have a point
if you think about the background of endless conversation with your friends it is the sort of texture of your relationship with them it's against that background that you can have friends you know no no group of friends agrees about everything and some of the things you disagree about a serious right I have friends who are under the mistaken conviction that it was a good thing that the pack is one of the suitable and I have to accept that and this is a serious a serious disagreement but so and it's but more importantly I have friends who are Catholics and I have friends who are atheists who do satis once a year and I have friends who are Methodists and I have friends who are unitarians of the sort that are really not very believing and so on and those are serious differences but and if we if we only came together to talk about theology we wouldn't have much of a relationship we only came together to try and settle the things we disagree about we wouldn't be getting along it's the background of sort of endless shared conversation which you agree about this you disagree about that some of the things you disagree about are important some of the things you agree about are important and then when you come to a moment of serious disagreement you can handle the fact and you can you can as it were except the outcome even if it's not the one you chose you would have chosen if it had been up to you so now that that's that's a picture of a kind of successful interpersonal relationship how you turn that into a social practice especially that's I'm not saying that's easy but one of the things I think that is required is a willingness to feel that it would be good to be in dialogue with fellow citizens of all sorts and it's not good
my own sort of way of dealing with the fact that there are people out there who just dancing to grass what seems to me evident about moral is to begin with another philosophical idea an idea that I tried to make something up in the book on cosmopolism which is what philosophers would call an epistemological idea it's an idea of fallableness and I think that it's terribly important to a knowledge that it's hard to figure out what the right answer is and that even if you're sure you've got it you should be open to the possibility that it's gonna turn out that you're wrong
