Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis

The dawn of the Enlightenment saw heated debates on self-love. Do people only act out of self-interest? Or is there a less pessimistic explanation for human behaviour? Maurer delves into the contributions to these debates from both famous and lesser known authors, including Lord Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, Archibald Campbell, David Hume and Adam Smith, and puts them in their philosophical, theological and economic context. Maurer identifies five distinct conceptions of self-love and looks at their role within theories of human psychology and morality while drawing attention to the heuristic limits of our contemporary notion of egoism. He compares the central arguments and the different strategies intended to morally rehabilitate human nature and self-love before and during the Enlightenment.

Christian Maurer is SNSF Professor in Philosophy at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He has studied, taught and held research fellowships in various Universities across Switzerland, Scotland, France and Germany. Maurer's main research areas are in moral and political philosophy. He has worked extensively on the history of British moral philosophy and theology, on pre-Enlightenment Scottish moral philosophy, on the reception of Stoicism, on tolerance and on love.