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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

UFS experimental farm gets ultra modern tractor
2006-12-04

The Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the University of the Free State (UFS) recently acquired a McCormick MC 115 tractor equipped with the latest technology. This was made possible by a sponsorship of R100 000 by BUO Agri in Bultfontein, who serve as agents for McCormick. At the moment about 300ha soil is being used for the cultivation of mealies and wheat, which are used as basis for the feed of cows on the Paradys Experimental Farm. The cultivars will in future also be used by postgraduate students for experiments. The farm will also in the future conduct experiments with seeds for seed companies. Attending the delivery of the tractor were, from the left: Mr Danie Nortjé (National Service and Product Manager of McCormich SA), Prof Herman van Schalkwyk (Dean of the UFS Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences), Mr Ian Bothma (M Sc-student at the UFS) and Mr Jan Jacobs (Sales Agent of McCormich SA).

Photo: Supplied

 

 

 

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