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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

Winner: Copy-writing course
2006-06-06

Ms Magdaleen Kruger, station manager of RSG, visited the University of the Free State's (UFS) Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, German and French to hand over the RSG Prize for copy-writing to Miss Nadia Fourie, a student at the UFS. Me Fourie was a final-year student in the programme Integrated Marketing Communication in 2005. The copy- writing course is compulsory for this qualification.

The copy-writing course is presented on behalf of the UFS Department of Communication and Information Studies by Dr Angelique van Niekerk, lecturer at the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, German and French. RSG has been an external partner of the copy-writing course since 2005 and also serve on the judges’ panel of the Afrikaans radio advertisements made during this course.  The extension of the partnership between the UFS and RSG was also discussed. 

During the awarding of the RSG Prize were in front, from the left: Dr van Niekerk and Ms Kruger.  At the back were from the left Ms Fourie (prize winner), Ms Lacea Loader (media representative of the UFS) and Ms Dalmé Mulder (lecturer at the UFS Department of Communication and Information Studies). Photo: Stephen Collett

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