An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler

Karol Wojtyła's habilitation thesis, accepted by the Faculty of Theology of the Jagiellonian University in December 1953, one of the last before the communist authorities abolished that faculty in 1954. It asks whether the ethical system of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler, whom Wojtyła read in German, can serve as a foundation for Christian ethics. He concluded that Scheler's system could not, as it stood, be reconciled with Christian morality, but he kept the tools of phenomenological analysis and used them in his own later philosophy. It was published as a book by the Scientific Society of the Catholic University of Lublin; the Holy See's chronology dates the publication to January 1960. It was reprinted in 1991 in the collection Zagadnienie podmiotu moralności.