This episode features Part one of an interview I conducted with Kwame Anthony Appiah on March 29, 2025. Anthony is an author, intellectual, philosopher and writer. He writes The Ethicist column for the New York Times and he is a professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Anthony has written several books including Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, The Ethics of Identity, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Dubois and the Emergency of Identity, and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. He also co-authored Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race with Amy Gutmann and The Dictionary of Global Culture with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In our interview Anthony shares why the idea of Western civilization is at best a source of confusion, and at worst an obstacle to solving some of our biggest political problems. He discusses how intellectually, Islam and Christianity are tightly connected by their shared interest in the Abrahamic faith and Aristotle, how democracy is possible everywhere but not guaranteed anywhere, and how examples of religious toleration and religious intolerance exist both in so-called Western countries and countries outside the West. Anthony shares how Confucius's view of education was more democratic than Plato and Aristotle, how Aristotle doesn't belong to the West but to anyone who chooses to read him, and how the line from Plato and Aristotle goes just as much through Baghdad as it does through Paris.