Rebecca Goldstein - Biography

Rebecca Goldstein (born February 23, 1950) is an American novelist and professor of philosophy. 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 Barnard College. She was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. She has one older brother who is an Orthodox Rabbi and a younger sister. After earning her Ph.D. from Princeton University, she returned to Barnard to teach courses in various philosophical studies. There she published her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem (1983), a serio-comic tale of the conflict between emotion and intelligence, combined with an examination of 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."

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. Properties of Light (2000) is 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). 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 in Jewish perspectives and history.

In addition to Barnard, Goldstein has taught at Columbia and Rutgers. She has been a visiting scholar at Brandeis University, and taught for five years as a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

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

Awards and fellowships

• 2011 Humanist of the Year awarded April 2011 by the American Humanist Association
• Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, 2006–2007
• Guggenheim Fellow, 2006–2007
• Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought,[1] 2006, for Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2005
• MacArthur Fellow, 1996
• National Jewish Book Award, 1995, for Mazel
• Edward Lewis Wallant Award, 1995, for Mazel
• National Jewish Book Award for her book of short stories, Strange Attractors
• Graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy,
• While at Princeton University, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship
• Whiting Foundation Fellowship, 1991

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Notes

External links

• Official website
• Rebecca Goldstein, the atheist with a soul in an interview on ThoughtCast, which was also broadcast on WGBH (FM)
• Interview, April 11, 2006
• Rebecca Goldstein discusses her book, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" on the 7th Avenue Project Radio Show
• An interview with Rebecca Goldstein, about her book "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity" California Literary Review, June 4, 2006
• "Reasonable Doubt": an essay on Baruch Spinoza on Edge.org
• "A Kibitz on Pure Reason": A three-day dialogue on "Betraying Spinoza" between Rebecca Goldstein and Michael Weiss. Jewcy.com, March 17–19, 2007.
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• On Rebecca Goldstein’s New York Times Book Review essay “Theory, Literature, Hoax”
• “Disenchanting Determinism,” commentary on Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God