About us

Emerita seit 01.10.2020

E-Mail: i.gabriel(at)univie.ac.at

Person

Following Prof. Gabriel’s retirement in October 2020, Alexander Filipović took over as head of the department in February 2021.

In 1997, Ingeborg Gabriel took over the chair and the directorship of the institute. She was the first female professorin the faculty’s history. Under her leadership, the institute was renamed the “Institute for Social Ethics” in 1998 and integrated into the “Institute for Systematic Theology and Ethics” as a department in 2016. With her academic background in the social sciences (economics, international relations) and theology, Professor Gabriel devoted herself, on the one hand, to the wide-ranging ethical, practical and socially oriented tasks of the Institute in research and teaching. Professor Gabriel also paid particular attention to the discourse on foundational principles: by the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguments based purely on natural law were increasingly losing their persuasive power in the field of social ethics. On the one hand, there was the question of establishing an internal theological connection within a pluralistic society; on the other, that of how to engage with secular social-ethical discourses in both the German-speaking and global contexts. The former requires greater reflection on, amongst other things, the biblical-theological foundations; for the latter, a link to human rights based on human dignity suggests itself, which, on closer inspection, is connected to natural law principles – particularly with regard to their universality. Under Prof. Gabriel, the Institute’s aim was to address these and other central issues of political and economic ethics within ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, adopting a mediating perspective. This aim is still reflected today in the mission statement and the research priorities of the department.

Rudolf Weiler took up the chair in 1966. As part of this process, the Faculty of Catholic Theology submitted a proposal to the University of Vienna to reclassify the chair as an institute, which subsequently took place. Professor Weiler became director of the newly founded institute. He was supported by his research assistants Werner Freistetter and Ingeborg Gabriel. In terms of content, Weiler built on the work of his predecessor, Messner, and applied his line of inquiry to various areas of life. Weiler focused his research efforts in particular on international ethics and the ethics of peace. In this context, he devoted himself above all to dialogue with communist institutions and colleagues in the field of ethics. In the wake of the geopolitical upheavals of 1989 and ’90, which led to the decline of communism and the fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’, this work was further developed within the Association for Catholic Social Ethics in Central Europe (Social Ethics in Central Europe). He made use of the opportunities for engagement with neighbouring Eastern European countries made possible by the association, thereby establishing relationships that are still maintained today. This also includes the thematic area ‘Ethics and Politics in the European Context’, which has been part of the Central European Exchange Programme for University Studies (CEEPUS) since 2012. Fifteen partner universities from Central Europe are actively involved in this exchange programme. A driving force behind the international exchange of early-career researchers was Marijana Kompes (research assistant at the Institute from 2011 to 2015), who now teaches as a junior lecturer at the Catholic University of Zagreb.

In 1935, the Chair of ‘Ethics and Christian Social Sciences’ was established at the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Vienna. Johannes Messner held this chair until 1962 and, with his approach based on natural law ethics, shaped the department for many years. In terms of content, Messner built on the natural law theorem, which he interpreted as a theory of the social. At its core, he posited a distinction between the natural – that is, what is comprehensible through reason alone – and the supernatural – that is, what is comprehensible through faith and revelation. This distinction was significant in terms of the chair’s importance within the range of subjects offered by theological faculties as a whole, as it meant that Christian social sciences were also reliant on other disciplines in their reasoning. Messner’s natural law ethics comprises three parts: a philosophy of law and legal ethics, a doctrine of natural law principles, and individual ethics.