[5] 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.
In 1973 he published a widely influential article titled "Dialectical Reason", in the British journal Radical Philosophy.
[7] He attended the South African Student Organisation (SASO) terrorism trial of nine Black Consciousness movement leaders as a defence witness in March 1976 where he expounded on theories expressed in The Eye of the Needle.
[7] In November 1976 Dr Turner received a Humboldt Fellowship, one of the world's leading academic awards from Heidelberg University, but after months of negotiating with the Minister of Justice, he was refused permission to travel to Germany.
[8] 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.