Hirsch Hadorn

Biography

Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn, born in 1953, got a Ph.D. in educational science at the University of Zurich in 1989, having worked as a researcher at the Educational Department of the Canton of Zurich from 1982 to 1988. She has joined the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH in 1990, where she is Adjunct Professor since 2006. She has completed her habilitation on „Nature and Ethics in the Debates on the Environment“ at the Philosophy Department at the University of Konstanz in 1998 and was a private lecturer in philosophy there until 2006. She replaced the chair in ethics at the University of Göttingen, Germany in 2000 and was a Guest Professor at the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies (IFF), Alpen-Adria-Univ. Klagenfurt-Graz-Vienna in Vienna in 2009. Her current research focuses on two topics. Firstly, she investigates the roles of epistemic standards and non-epistemic values in research, focusing on case-studies in climate change research and in ecological research. Secondly, she systematizes problems that arise with decision-making under great uncertainty, such as policy decisions on sustainable development.

Research Interest

Her research work and interests further include the methodoloy of transdisciplinary research, understanding knowledge and action with regards to environmental problems and sustainable development as well as environmental ethics, using philosophical methods in the analysis of concepts and arguments. Her past experiences as an empirical researcher involved work on conceptions for environmental education and analyses of teachers’ biographies, using mixed-methods