Thèse soutenue à l'Université de Neuchâtel, le 27 mars 2009, sous la direction du professeur Richard Glauser.

Résumé :

This doctoral thesis focuses on the debates on self-love in early 18th-century British moral philosophy, examining and comparing in particular the positions of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler and Archibald Campbell. The study distinguishes five different concepts of self-love, and analyses their role in the mentioned authors' theories of human nature and morality, examining the relations between the concepts of self-love and other essential concepts of moral philosophy such as benevolence, pity and virtue. It investigates aspects of the evaluation of self-love and provides an account of how the debates on the questions of self-love relate to more general discussions on human motivation and on the morality of human nature.