
On philosophy and its history
I am a philosophy teacher at the Collège St. Michel, a Grammar school founded in 1585 in Fribourg (Switzerland), and an associate member of the research centre PHARE, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
From 2016 until 2021, I was SNSF Professor at the Philosophy Department of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), and the PI of the research project Tolerance, Intolerance and Discrimination Regarding Religion.
Coming soon: The critical edition, with Knud Haakonssen, of Francis Hutcheson’s A System of Moral Philosophy, 1755 (Liberty Fund)

Book: Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis –
Edinburgh University Press 2019
Reviews in: Intellectual History Review, by James Harris; in Journal of Scottish Philosophy, by Erin Frykholm; in Journal of the History of Philosophy, by Aaron Garrett; in Journal for the History of Economic Thought, by Benoît Walraevens; in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, by Eugene Heath
My main research interests are in Ethics and Political Philosophy:
- Contemporary debates on tolerance / toleration; discrimination; forgiveness and love; virtue ethics
- Early modern moral philosophy, political philosophy and theology
- Early modern debates on tolerance and toleration
- Debates on self-love, amour-propre and egoism in early modern Europe
- Scottish moral philosophy and theology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
- The reception of Stoicism in early modern Europe
- Teaching methods in philosophy, questions of interdisciplinarity
- Translating and editing source material, e.g. Latin manuscripts and letters (see my edition of Shaftesbury’s “Pathologia” and of John Simson’s letters)
- Individual philosophers, e.g.: Archibald Campbell, Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson
Institutional address:
Christian Maurer
Collège St. Michel
Rue St-Pierre-Canisius 10
CH – 1700 Fribourg
Suisse / Switzerland