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15 March 2022

The Dean of the Faculty of Law invites staff and interested individuals to attend the inaugural lecture of Prof Ulrike Kistner, Department of Public Law, titled The ‘person’ in question – legally, grammatically, philosophically.

Date: 17 March 2022
Time: 17:30
Venue: Equitas Auditorium

To attend the lecture, please RSVP to Refilwe Majola at MajolaRRM@ufs.ac.za

More about the speaker:

Prof Kistner has held teaching positions in Comparative Literature at Wits University, Modern European Languages at UNISA, and Philosophy at the University of Pretoria. She is currently working at intersections between political philosophy, social theory, jurisprudence, and psychoanalytic theory.

Abstract:

A major shift has been noted in constitutionalism and human rights frameworks – from human and civil rights to principles centred on ‘personhood’ and ‘dignity’. This shift calls for closer historical-critical investigation of the status of ‘person’. Roberto Esposito directs this inquiry to a philosophical grammar of the impersonal third person.

My contribution to this inquiry sets in with a probing of Esposito’s propositions, considering the post-apartheid elevation of ‘person’ in constitutionalism and philosophical elaborations of communitarianism. To the extent that the concept of ‘ubuntu’ is embedded in a linguistic ontology developed by Kinyarwanda, my argument will navigate between Rwanda and South Africa in the mid-1990s, and between juridical, moral-philosophical, linguistic, and Africanist notions of ‘ubuntu’ and corresponding claims on African philosophy.

The radical questioning of ethnolinguistic tenets on the part of some African philosophers brings me back to the philosophical grammar of the third person which, far from being confined to study old grammar books, opens alternatives to ethnophilosophical approaches to the ‘person’ in question. 

News Archive

Master's students from across Africa attend a contact session on Political Transformation
2010-02-10

Here are, from the left: Mr A.J. Lungu (Zambia), Mr C.A. Imana (Kenia), Mr M.I. Thejane (Lesotho), Mr T.E Tlalajoe (Lesotho), Dr T. Coetzee (Programme Director and presenter), Mr N.E Mohapi (Lesotho), Ms N.E. Johane (Lesotho) and Mr U.S. Kejem (Cameroon).
Photo: Supplied


Master’s students in the Department of Governance and Political transformation at the University of the Free State (UFS) recently attended a contact session on “Research Methodology and writing of a research proposal” on the Main Campus in Bloemfontein. A total of 55 students are currently registered for their master’s degrees. This includes students who are already busy with their extended scripts from the previous year and those who enrolled for the master’s degree for the first time this year.
 

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