graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1963 with a B.A. Honours. He continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris where he studied philosophy under Henri Lefebvre and received a doctorate for a dissertation on the French intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre.

He returned to South Africa in 1966 and worked on his mother’s farm in Stellenbosch for two years before lecturing at the universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Rhodes. He moved to Natal in 1970 and become a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Natal and in that same year he met Steve Biko and the two formed a close relationship and became the leading figures in The Durban Moment.

Turner became a prominent academic at the University and assumed a leading role in radical philosophy in South Africa and published a number of papers. His work was written from a radical existential perspective and stressed the virtues of bottom up popular democracy against authoritarian Stalinist and Trotskyist strands of leftism. He was a strong advocate of workers' control and a critic of the reduction of politics to party politics.

On 8 January 1978, Turner was shot through a window of his home in Dalton Avenue, Bellair (a suburb of Durban), and died in the arms of his 13-year-old daughter, Jann. After months of investigations police investigations turned up with no clues, and his killers were never identified. However it is widely believed that he was murdered by the apartheid security police

 

He is recognised as the one of the most significant academic philosophers to have come out of South Africa. His work is still read in popular radical movements and South African academics like Anthony Fluxman, Mabogo Percy More, Andrew Nash and Peter Vale have continued to make use of his work.

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Richard Albert Turner | South African History Online (sahistory.org.za) 

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Rick Turner (philosopher) - Wikipedia 

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Richard Turner | South African Political Activist and Philosopher (sahistory.org.za) 

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Who killed Dr Rick Turner? (iol.co.za)