Inaugural address: Professor Leonhard Praeg

On the 02 August 2018 Professor Leonhard Praeg from the Department of Philosophy presented his inaugural address

Herewith an abstract of his inaugural address:

ABSTRACT

Since the inception of the university as modern institution –and here we can take Immanuel
Kant’s Conflict of Faculties [1798] as foundational – the primary or core function of the
Humanities has consisted in offering an internal critique of the process of knowledge
production as such. Formulated more succinctly, the core function of the Humanities consists
in interrogating the core function of the university; to make visible the invisible; to make
explicit the implicit. In the spirit of that historic purpose I analyse recent developments in the
debate on what ‘a decolonised philosophy curriculum’ may mean. The explicit call to make
visible the politics of knowledge production is paradoxically accompanied by a global
depoliticization of universities. In the second part of my address I argue that, as a direct
consequence of the student protests/revolt of 2015-16, the University of Pretoria has
reconstituted itself as a micro-state through a number of mimetic acts historically associated
with state formation. Foremost among these have been the creation of border control and the
declaration of a de facto state of emergency. The purpose of this reconstitution, I argue, is the
depoliticization of the university in a way that is inimical to academic freedom and the
democratic project.

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