Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer who played an important role in the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, not least by bringing the works of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke to the attention of his students and his readers throughout Europe. He drew upon the Reformed or Presbyterian theology taught in Scottish universities in that era to propose that in respecting the natural rights of individuals, one signifies one's reverence for God's creation. Inasmuch as all of mankind longs for lasting happiness or beatitude and such happiness can be found only in worship of or reverence for God, such reverence is the natural law which obliges all men to respect the rights of men and citizens.

An interesting and ambitious comparative study of the emergence of Enlightenment in Scotland and Naples. Challenging the tendency to fragment the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments, John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two societies at the opposite ends of Europe shared common intellectual preoccupations.

Enlightenment, Legal Education, and Critique deals with broad themes in Legal History, such as the development of Scots Law through the major legal thinkers of the Enlightenment, essays on Roman law and miscellaneous essays on the literary and philosophic

In Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty new research by leading international scholars is brought to bear on a single crucial issue: the role of early modern natural law doctrines in reconstructing the relations between moral right and civil authority in the face of profound religious and political conflict. In addition to providing fresh insights into the hard-fought struggle to legitimate a desacralised civil order, the book also shows the degree to which the legitimacy of the modern secular state remains dependent on this decisive set of developments.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and ongoing debt-related troubles there have been widespread calls to put banking and economic activity on a secure ethical foundation, either by regulation or through voluntary reform. In this volume a distinguished set of authors explore various economic, philosophical, and ethical ideas from historical, contemporary, and future-looking perspectives. At the core are two related ideas much mentioned but far more rarely examined: the idea of natural law and that of the common good. In these essays the foundations and meaning of these notions are carefully studied and put to work in examining the nature and scope of ethics in relation to global economics.

Kantian autonomy is often thought to be independent of time and place, but J.B. Schneewind in his landmark study, The Invention of Autonomy, has shown that there is much to be learned by setting Kant's moral philosophy in the context of the history of modern moral philosophy.The distinguished authors in the collection continue Schneewind's project by relating Kant's work to the historical context of his predecessors and to the empirical context of human agency.This will be a valuable resource for professionals and advanced students.