Victor Nuovo
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Victor Nuovo: Plato and the moral universe
Editor’s note: Sixth in a series. The previous essay concluded on a new note: the idea of a moral universe, and I have returned to Plato as my…
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Victor Nuovo: A platonic digression
The title of this essay calls for an explanation. Four weeks ago, I began a series entitled “The Life of the Mind in America.” This essay, the fifth…
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Victor Nuovo: The mind of Jonathan Edwards
It is regrettable that Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) is mostly remembered for a sermon, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.” As his biographer Perry Miller once remarked,…
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Victor Nuovo: The first Great Awakening
Editor’s note: Third in a series. A variety of motives caused Europeans to hazard crossing the Atlantic Ocean to settle in America 300 years ago. For some, it…
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Victor Nuovo: The American Sublime
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series called “The Life of the Mind in America.”Perry Miller did not live to complete “The Life of the Mind…
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Nuovo leaves public service to ponder more of life’s mysteries
MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury Selectman Victor Nuovo has resigned from the selectboard, citing his desire to probe the philosophical mysteries of life during the balance of his golden years.…
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Victor Nuovo: Discovering what America means
This essay begins a new series about American intellectual history. I have entitled it “The Life of the Mind in America,” which is the title of an unfinished…
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Victor Nuovo: Sovereign law makes us free
Thomas Hobbes perceived that politics was all about power; the power to govern, to command, to make laws, and to enforce them, along with the power to levy…
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Victor Nuovo: Democracy seems in mortal peril
This week’s writer is Victor Nuovo, professor emeritus of Philosophy at Middlebury College and a Middlebury selectboard member. “If a man die, shall he live again?” The question…
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Victor Nuovo: Creating Civil Society
Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy is a paradoxical fabric. On the one hand, his view of mankind is uncomplimentary, bordering on the defamatory; and yet he also imagines our…