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The Lies That Bind
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The details are:
* Title: The Lies That Bind
* Author name: Kwame Anthony Appiah
* ISBN (or ASIN): 9781781259238
* Publisher: Profile Books
* Publication Date Year: 2018
* Publication Date Month: February
* Publication Date Day: 1
* Page count: 256
* Format: Hardcover
The text on the dust jacket is as below:
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Identity is not just personal. Our sense of self is shaped by countless affiliations, such as nationality, culture, class, race and religion. Yet these collective identities that shape our world are riddled with contradiction.
The Lies That Bind challenges our assumptions about how identity works: we all know there are conflicts between identities but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. In provocative and lively chapters, he weaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical, cultural and literary tales – from Anton Wilhelm Amo, the eighteenth-century African child who became an eminent European academic, to Italo Svevo, the literary genius who changed countries without leaving home – to explore the entanglements within the stories we tell ourselves.
Religion, Appiah shows, isn't primarily about beliefs. The idea of national self-determination isn't coherent. Our everyday racial thinking is an artefact of discarded science. Meritocracy can worsen the injuries of class. And the very idea of Western culture is an unhelpful myth. We will see our situation more clearly if we start to question the lies that bind us.
An arresting argument from one of our leading philosophers, this book will transform the way we think.
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Thanks, Matthew