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Rebecca Goldstein

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Rebecca Goldstein
Born
Rebecca Newberger

(1950-02-23) February 23, 1950 (age 74)
White Plains, New York
NationalityAmerican
Occupation(s)Novelist
Philosopher
Spouse(s)Sheldon Goldstein (divorced)
Steven Pinker

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (born February 23, 1950) is an American novelist and philosopher. She has written five novels, a number of short stories and essays, and biographical studies of mathematician Kurt Gödel and philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Life and career

Goldstein, born Rebecca Newberger, grew up in White Plains, New York, and did her undergraduate work at City College of New York, UCLA, and Barnard College, where she graduated as valedictorian in 1972. She was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. She has one older brother who is an Orthodox Rabbi, and she also has a younger sister. After earning her Ph.D. from Princeton University, where she studied with Thomas Nagel and wrote a dissertation on “Reduction, Realism and the Mind,” she returned to Barnard as a professor of philosophy. There she published her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem (1983), a serio-comic tale of the conflict between emotion and intelligence, combined with reflections on the nature of mathematical genius, the challenges faced by intellectual women, and Jewish tradition and identity. Goldstein said she wrote the book to "...insert 'real life' intimately into the intellectual struggle. In short I wanted to write a philosophically motivated novel."[1]

Her second novel, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989), was also set in academia, though with a far darker tone. Her third novel, The Dark Sister (1993), was something of a departure: a postmodern fictionalization of family and professional issues in the life of William James. Mazel followed in 1995. A "genius grant" from the MacArthur Fellows Program in 1996 led to the writing of Properties of Light (2000), a ghost story about love, betrayal, and quantum physics. Her latest novel is 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (2010), which explores ongoing controversies over religion and reason through the tale of a professor of psychology who has written an atheist bestseller while his life is permeated with secular versions of religious themes such as messianism, divine genius, and the quest for immortality. The book contains a lengthy nonfiction appendix (attributed to the novel's protagonist) which details thirty-six traditional and modern arguments for the existence of God together with their refutations. Goldstein has published a collection of short stories, Strange Attractors (1993), that also treated "interactions of thought and feeling," to quote the cover jacket.

Recently Goldstein has turned to biography with her books Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (2005) and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006). The books reflect her continuing interests in the relationship between the life of the mind and the demands of everyday existence and the ways in which classical philosophical topics such as personal identity and the nature of truth play out in people's lives. Betraying Spinoza combined a continuing interest in Jewish ideas and history with an increasing concern with secularism, humanism, and atheism. Together with 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction it established her as a prominent figure in the humanist movement, part of a wave of "new new atheists" marked by less divisive rhetoric and a greater representation of women[2]. In 2011 she was named "Humanist of the Year" by the American Humanist Association and "Freethought Heroine" by the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

In addition to Barnard, Goldstein has taught at Columbia, Rutgers, and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and she is currently a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities in London. She has held visiting fellowships at Brandeis University, the Santa Fe Institute, Yale University, and Dartmouth College. In 2011 she delivered the Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Yale University, entitled "The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature."

Goldstein lives in Boston and Truro. She divorced her first husband, physicist Sheldon Goldstein, and married[3] Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. She is the mother of the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

Awards and fellowships

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Rebecca Goldstein web site". Retrieved 2006-11-07.
  2. ^ http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sa-test/2010/02/atheists_--_naughty_and_nice_--_should_define_themselves.html
  3. ^ Crace, John (June 17, 2008). "Interview: Harvard University's Steven Pinker". The Guardian. London.
  4. ^ http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2010/1201/Best-books-of-2010-fiction/36-Arguments-for-the-Existence-of-God-by-Rebecca-Newberger-Goldstein
  5. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter G" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  6. ^ "Rebecca Newberger Goldstein bio". Retrieved 2007-09-12.

External links

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