Johan Degenaar, who has died in Somerset West at the age of 89, was known as the Socrates of Stellenbosch. He was a dissident professor of philosophy at Stellenbosch University for 40 years. He challenged the domination that the all-powerful Dutch Reformed Church exercised over the teaching of philosophy at the university and, like his hero Socrates, was accused of poisoning the minds of the youth.He introduced his students to existential thinkers like Kierkegaard and Camus, which in the controlled, dogma-ridden intellectual environment of Stellenbosch University in the 1950s and 1960s, was a revolutionary and even dangerous thing to do.He was particularly influenced by Kierkegaard, regarded as the father of existentialism, whose interpretation of the Gospel placed a high premium on personal choices. He taught that individuals must take responsibility for their own choices about the world and religion rather than accept the official line.story_article_left1This was anathema to the authoritarian, rigidly hierarchical Dutch Reformed Church which regarded the philosophy department as a vehicle for its Calvinist dogma.Perhaps the most controversial thing Degenaar wrote was Die Sterflikheid van die Siel [The Mortality of the Soul], which challenged the concept of an immortal soul and emphasised corporeality and the fact that our humanity is defined by our physical existence.We must seek truth in the physical here and now, he said, not in some deferred spiritual hereafter.He challenged the tradition at Stellenbosch University which saw philosophy as the handmaiden of religion, more specifically the Dutch Reformed Church.According to this tradition, the job of the philosophy department was to prepare students to become dominees.The politically well-connected and formidable Koot Vorster, future moderator of the church and brother of the future National Party prime minister John Vorster, leaned heavily on the university to fire Degenaar, whom he regarded as a dangerous heretic.He was protected by the head of the philosophy department, Professor Freddie Kirsten, who had supervised his master's degree thesis Kennis as Lewe [Life as Knowledge], and with whom he had a good relationship.Kirsten was related to the rector of the university, HB Thom, an influential member of the Afrikaner Broederbond who, fortunately for Degenaar, had powerful connections of his own.story_article_right2Instead of being fired, Degenaar was removed from the department of philosophy and put in charge of a newly created department of political philosophy, where it was felt he would not be able to poison the minds of the Dutch Reformed Church's future dominees.The department was poorly resourced and for nine years effectively a one-man show, that man being Degenaar. Ironically, the consequence of this was that he turned his questioning mind to politics, which had never been a great interest of his before. Although never a political activist, or indeed any other kind of activist, he subjected apartheid to the same probing philosophical interrogation that until then he had reserved for religion.He became one of the first major Afrikaner thinkers to question openly the spiritual, moral and intellectual underpinning of apartheid. Importantly, he provided an intellectual space at what was still an overwhelmingly conservative institution, for those of the post-Soweto 1976 generation of Afrikaans students who wanted to question the status quo.Degenaar's influence on the Afrikaans intelligentsia was significant. He and fellow Stellenbosch University academic Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, who revered Degenaar, were the two critics outside the National Party whom Afrikaner nationalists took most seriously, because their reasoning came closest to shaking their belief in the ideological underpinnings of apartheid.To talk in terms of Degenaar teaching his students anything is misleading. He was a Socratic philosopher and he said that, like Socrates, he was not interested in teaching students so much as, through dialogue, helping them to find out for themselves.story_article_left3He said he underwent one big conversion in his life, but it wasn't a religious conversion. It was meeting Socrates at Stellenbosch, he said.His motto, which he derived from another of his great heroes, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed by the Nazis, was: "The unexamined life is not worth living."Degenaar was born on March 7 1926 in Ladysmith in KwaZulu-Natal. Initially he was a theology student at Stellenbosch University but gave that up to concentrate on philosophy. He studied at the universities of Groningen and Leiden in the Netherlands, and Heidelberg in Germany.He began lecturing at Stellenbosch in 1949 and was awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1950.His many publications included monographs on the Afrikaans poet NP van Wyk Louw, the Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Albert Camus.In the 1980s he wrote and lectured on aesthetics and literary theory.He analysed The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the film based on the novel by Milan Kundera, and was involved in making a documentary on the psychology of fairytales called Understanding Little Red Riding Hood. He thought they contained deep insights into the human psyche.He is survived by two sons. His Dutch-born wife Jetty, whom he met and married in South Africa in the early 1950s, died a couple of years ago.1926-2015..