ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief introduction to the views of five of Hume’s most important influences: John Locke, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the third Earl of Shaftesbury), Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, and Joseph Butler. Its focus is on the debate about self-love, which divided the Epicurean egoists Locke and Mandeville (together with the earlier Thomas Hobbes) from the Stoical sentimentalists Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Butler. Egoism is distinguished from the closely related views of hedonism and pessimism, and the important anti-egoist arguments from Butler’s Sermons are examined. It is argued that Hutcheson was a hedonist, though of course he agreed with Shaftesbury and Butler in rejecting egoism and pessimism.
