Appiah, Darnton receive top humanities award

Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah and professor emeritus Robert Darnton received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House Feb. 13. The medal, awarded to eight recipients, is the ­federal government’s highest honor for cultural achievement.

Appiah, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and the Center for Human Values, was cited as a philosopher “seeking eternal truths in the contemporary world” whose works “have shed moral and intellectual light on the individual in an era of globalization and evolving group identities.”

President Tilghman described Appiah as “one of Princeton’s most luminous scholars and a true ­citizen of the world.”

Darnton was a history professor at Princeton from 1968 to 2007, when he was named university librarian at Harvard. He was honored for his “commitment to making knowledge accessible to everyone,” with Obama citing Darnton’s vision for a national library of digitized books.