The meaning of life
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Victor Nuovo: The Rule of Law
It is commonplace to refer to the United States of America as a democracy. But those who speak this way, although they speak sincerely, state it incorrectly.
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Victor Nuovo: William Ernest Henley (1849-1903): Unconquered
Robert Louis Stevenson, who was William Ernest Henley’s lifelong friend, fashioned the character of Long John Silver after him, particularly on “his maimed strength and masterfulness.”
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Victor Nuovo: The irony of war
The theme of this essay occurred to me while reading a new history of the Second World War entitled “Blood and Ruins, The Last Imperial War.”
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Victor Nuovo: Time and eternity: Human focus on here and now results in untold suffering
13th in a series I concluded last week’s essay with a question: whether human history has any meaning. And I suggested that an answer might be found in…
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Victor Nuovo: Does a look at our history have moral purpose?
Shakespeare’s “Tragedy of Macbeth” is about a man who would be King; who, motivated by envy and ambition, achieved his life’s goal by committing murder, only to be…
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Victor Nuovo: Defining the Good itself
The theme of my last four essays has been Good and Evil, but so far I have failed to define these words.
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Victor Nuovo: The best of all possible worlds
The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz believed that God was the ultimate cause of existence, that God created the world from nothing.
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Victor Nuovo: How can God allow evil to exist?
What is the problem of evil? The fact that there is evil, that bad things happen, is undeniable. But this doesn’t constitute a single problem; rather it presents…
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Victor Nuovo: The right and the good
When Adam and Eve disobeyed the divine prohibition and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they couldn’t have known that they…
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Victor Nuovo: Good and evil, gods and humans
It is impossible to reach an understanding of the meaning of life without a knowledge of good and evil, for lacking it we would not be able to…
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Victor Nuovo: Plato considers time, being, creation
Plato was not only a profound philosopher, but also a consummate artist, and reading his works is not only interesting and intellectually challenging, but an aesthetic delight.
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Victor Nuovo: Death and immortality
Socrates imagined that death is one of two things: Either it is extinction, or the release of the soul from the body and its migration to another place.
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Victor Nuovo: Look to our great moral teachers
It is a curious fact that the two greatest moral teachers of the Western intellectual tradition — Socrates of Athens (470–399 BCE) and Jesus of Nazareth (4 BCE–30…
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Victor Nuovo: Does God exist?
In my last essay I wrote that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who was surely a great philosopher, believed that God is the reason for everything, which leads to…
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Victor Nuovo: The fundamental questions of the meaning of life
“Why is there anything at all? Why not Nothing?” The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) took this to be the fundamental question of philosophy.
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Victor Nuovo: Like everyone, I ask, “What does it all mean?”
What is the meaning of life? I will consider answers to this question in a new series of essays.