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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

Young UFS researchers learn with mentorship programme
2006-11-22

The Faculty of the Humanities at the University of the Free State (UFS) presented a research day for young researchers.  The event, which forms part of the faculty’s mentorship programme, gave young researchers the opportunity to deliver their papers, learn from other researchers and share ideas with them. 

Attending the research day were, from the left:  Ms Steffi Cawood (from the UFS Programme for Africa Studies in the Department of Afroasiatic Studies, Sign Language and Language Practice), Prof Engela Pretorius (Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the UFS and mentor), Ms Maryna de Wet (from the UFS Department of Sociology), Ms Nadine Lake (from the  Gender Studies Programme at the UFS) and Ms Katherine Geldenhuys (from the UFS Department of English and Classical Languages).

 

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