Rebecca Goldstein

Last updated
Rebecca Goldstein
Rebecca Goldstein.jpg
Born
Rebecca Newberger

(1950-02-23) February 23, 1950 (age 74)
White Plains, New York, U.S.
Alma mater Barnard College (BA)
Princeton University (PhD)
Spouses
  • ​
    ​
    (m. 1969;div. 1999)​
  • ​
    (m. 2007)​
Children
Institutions Columbia University
Rutgers University
Trinity College
Harvard University
New York University [4]

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (born February 23, 1950) is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and is sometimes grouped with novelists such as Richard Powers and Alan Lightman, who create fiction that is knowledgeable of, and sympathetic toward, science. [5] [6]

Contents

In her three non-fiction works, she has shown an affinity for philosophical rationalism, as well as a conviction that philosophy, like science, makes progress, [7] and that scientific progress is itself supported by philosophical arguments. [8]

Increasingly, in her talks and interviews, she has been exploring what she has called "mattering theory" as an alternative to traditional utilitarianism. [9] [10] This theory is a continuation of her idea of "the mattering map", first suggested in her novel The Mind–Body Problem. The concept of the mattering map has been widely adopted in contexts as diverse as cultural criticism, [11] [12] psychology, [13] and behavioral economics. [14]

Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow, and has received the National Humanities Medal [15] and the National Jewish Book Award.

Early life and education

Goldstein, born Rebecca Newberger, grew up in White Plains, New York. She was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. She has one older brother, who is an Orthodox rabbi, and a younger sister, Sarah Stern. An older sister, Mynda Barenholtz, died in 2001. She did her undergraduate work at City College of New York, UCLA, and Barnard College, [16] where she graduated as valedictorian in 1972. After earning her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University, where she studied with Thomas Nagel and wrote a dissertation titled "Reduction, Realism, and the Mind", she returned to Barnard as a professor of philosophy. [17]

Career

In 1983, Goldstein published her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, 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." [18]

Her second novel, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989), was also set in academia. [19] Her third novel, The Dark Sister (1993), was a fictionalization of family and professional issues in the life of William James. She followed it with a short-story collection, Strange Attractors (1993), which was a National Jewish Honor Book and New York Times Notable Book of the Year. [20] A fictional mother, daughter, and granddaughter introduced in two of the stories in that collection became the main characters of [21] Goldstein's next novel, Mazel (1995), which won the National Jewish Book Award [22] and the 1995 Edward Lewis Wallant Award.

A MacArthur Fellowship in 1996 led to the writing of Properties of Light (2000), a ghost story about love, betrayal, and quantum physics. Her most recent novel is 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (2010), [6] which explores ongoing controversies over religion and reason through the tale of a professor of psychology who has written an atheist best-seller, while his life is permeated with secular versions of religious themes. [6] National Public Radio chose it as one of its "five favorite books of 2010", [23] and The Christian Science Monitor named it the best book of fiction of 2010. [24]

Goldstein has written two biographical studies: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (2005); and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006). Betraying Spinoza combined her continuing interest in Jewish ideas, history, and identity with an increasing focus on secularism, humanism, and atheism. Goldstein called the book "the eighth book I'd published, but [the] first in which I took the long-delayed and irrevocable step of integrating my private and public selves". [25] 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. [26]

In 2014, Goldstein published Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, an exploration of the historical roots and contemporary relevance of philosophy.

In addition to Barnard, Goldstein has taught at Columbia, Rutgers, and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and since 2014, she has been [27] a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities in London. In 2016, she was a visiting professor in the English department at New York University. [28] In 2011, she delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University, "The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature". She serves on the Council on Values of the World Economic Forum, [29] and on the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America. [30]

Goldstein's writing has also appeared in chapters in a number of edited books, in journals including The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Tikkun, Commentary , and in blog format in The Washington Post 's "On Faith" section. [31] [32]

Personal life

Goldstein married her first husband, physicist Sheldon Goldstein, in 1969, [33] and they divorced in 1999. [33] They are the parents of the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and poet Danielle Blau. In a 2006 interview with Luke Ford, Goldstein said:

I lived Orthodox for a long time. My husband was Orthodox. Because I didn't want to be hypocritical with our kids, I kept everything. I was torn like a character in a Russian novel. It lasted through college. I remember leaving a class on mysticism in tears because I had forsaken God. That was probably my last burst of religious passion. Then it went away, and I was a happy little atheist. [33]

In 2007, Goldstein married cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. [34]

Awards and fellowships

Bibliography

Fiction

Short stories

Nonfiction

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baruch Spinoza</span> 17th century philosopher (1632–1677)

Baruch (de) Spinoza, also known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza, was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin. A forerunner of the Age of Enlightenment, Spinoza significantly influenced modern biblical criticism, 17th-century rationalism, and Dutch intellectual culture, establishing himself as one of the most important and radical philosophers of the early modern period. Influenced by Stoicism, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Ibn Tufayl, and heterodox Christians, Spinoza was a leading philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Eliot</span> English novelist and poet (1819–1880)

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). As with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patricia Churchland</span> Canadian-American analytic philosopher

Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland. Larissa MacFarquhar, writing for The New Yorker, observed of the philosophical couple that: "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James K. Morrow</span> American author

James Morrow is an American novelist and short-story writer known for filtering large philosophical and theological questions through his satiric sensibility.

Jewish atheism is the atheism of people who are ethnically and culturally Jewish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antony Flew</span> English analytic and evidentialist philosopher (1923–2010)

Antony Garrard Newton Flew was an English philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew worked on the philosophy of religion. During the course of his career he taught philosophy at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading in the United Kingdom, and at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Dawkins Award</span> Award presented by the Center for Inquiry

The Richard Dawkins Award is an annual prize awarded by the Center for Inquiry (CFI). It was established in 2003 and was initially awarded by the Atheist Alliance of America coordinating with Richard Dawkins and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. In 2019, the award was formally moved to CFI. CFI is a US nonprofit organization that variously claims on its website to promote reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values, or science, reason, and secular values. The award was initially presented by the Atheist Alliance of America to honor an "outstanding atheist", who taught or advocated scientific knowledge and acceptance of nontheism, and raised public awareness. The award is currently presented by the Center for Inquiry to an individual associated with science, scholarship, education, or entertainment, and who "publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead." They state that the recipient must be approved by Dawkins himself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. C. Grayling</span> English philosopher

Anthony Clifford Grayling is a British philosopher and author. He was born in Northern Rhodesia and spent most of his childhood there and in Nyasaland. In 2011 he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London. Until June 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, where he taught from 1991. He is also a supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, where he formerly taught.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Cameron Jackson</span> Australian philosopher

Frank Cameron JacksonFBA is an Australian analytic philosopher and Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophy at Australian National University (ANU) where he had spent most of the latter part of his career. His primary research interests include epistemology, metaphysics, meta-ethics and the philosophy of mind. In the latter field he is best known for the "Mary's room" knowledge argument, a thought experiment that is one of the most discussed challenges to physicalism.

Edward Lewis Wallant was an American novelist who wrote The Pawnbroker (1961). It was adapted into an award-winning film of the same name, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger. He also worked in the 1950s as an art director at the advertising firm McCann Erickson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Rosenberg</span> American philosopher and novelist

Alexander Rosenberg is an American philosopher and novelist. He is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, well known for contributions to philosophy of biology and philosophy of economics.

Steven Mitchell Nadler is an American/Canadian academic and philosopher specializing in 17th-century philosophy. He is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, and was Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also director of their Institute for Research in the Humanities.

Heidi M. Ravven is the Bates and Benjamin Professor of Classical and Religious Studies at Hamilton College, where she has taught her specialization, Jewish Philosophy, and general Jewish Studies since 1983. She is a Fellow in Neurophilosophy of the Integrative Neurosciences Research Program, which is co-directed by Vilayanur Ramachandran and Kjell Fuxe. She has been appointed Visiting Professor of Philosophy in the School of Marxism at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China, for 2017-20.

<i>Great House</i> (novel) 2010 novel by Nicole Krauss

Great House is the third novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published on October 12, 2010 by W. W. Norton & Company. Early versions of the first chapter were published in Harper's, Best American Short Stories 2008, and The New Yorker. Great House was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Fiction.

Yael Goldstein Love is an American novelist, editor and book critic. She is also co-founder and editorial director of the literary studio Plympton.

References

  1. ↑ "Sheldon Goldstein" (PDF). Rutgers University, Department of Mathematics.
  2. ↑ Kadish, Rachel (2012). "The Physics of Fiction, the Music of Philosophy: an Interview with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein". Ploughshares. Emerson College.
  3. ↑ Interview with Rebecca Goldstein (2006). "Novelist Rebecca Goldstein - The Mind-Body Problem". www.lukeford.net.
  4. ↑ Communications, NYU Web. "Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Named 2014 National Humanities Medal Recipient". nyu.edu.
  5. ↑ Lightman, Alan (15 March 2003). "Art That Transfigures Science". The New York Times.
  6. 1 2 3 Schillinger, Liesl. "Prove It". The New York Times . Retrieved 29 January 2010.
  7. ↑ Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger (14 April 2014). "How Philosophy Makes Progress" – via The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  8. ↑ Anthony, Andrew (19 October 2014). "Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: "Science is our best answer, but it takes a philosophical argument to prove that"". The Observer– via The Guardian.
  9. ↑ "Feminism, Religion, and 'Mattering'". www.secularhumanism.org. 26 July 2019.
  10. ↑ "The Machinery of Moral Progress: An Interview with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein – TheHumanist.com". 27 August 2014.
  11. ↑ Grossberg, Lawrence (1992). We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture . Routledge.
  12. ↑ Grossberg, Lawrence (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Duke University Press.
  13. ↑ Kashak, Ellyn (2013). "The Mattering Map: Integrating The Complexities of Knowledge, Experience and Meaning". Psychology of Women Quarterly. 37 (4): 436–443. doi:10.1177/0361684313480839. S2CID   144899088.
  14. ↑ Loewenstein, Meine, G., K. "On Mattering Maps" in Understanding Choice, Explaining Behavior: Essays in Honour of Ole-Jørgen Skog, Jon Elster, Olav Gjelsvik, Aanund Hyland, and Karl Moene (Eds.). Oslo, Norway: Oslo Academic Press. pp. 153–175.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  15. ↑ "Rebecca Newberger Goldstein". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2 September 2015.
  16. ↑ "Our Lab | Barnard Year of Science". yearofscience.barnard.edu. Retrieved 2022-08-16.
  17. ↑ "Biographical Sketch". www.rebeccagoldstein.com. Retrieved 2021-01-08.
  18. ↑ "Rebecca Goldstein web site". Archived from the original on 2006-12-12. Retrieved 2006-11-07.
  19. ↑ Reichel, Sabine (May 21, 1989). "Of Jews and Germans: The Conflict Unresolved : THE LATE-SUMMER PASSION OF A WOMAN OF MIND". Los Angeles Times .
  20. ↑ Goldstein, Rebecca (1993). Strange Attractors: Stories. Viking.
  21. ↑ Dickstein, Lore (October 29, 1995). "World of Our Mothers". The New York Times .
  22. 1 2 "Past Winners". Jewish Book Council. Retrieved 2020-01-20.
  23. ↑ McAlpin, Heller (November 23, 2010). "People Are Talking About These Five Books". National Public Radio .
  24. 1 2 Kehe, Marjorie (1 December 2010). "Best books of 2010: fiction". The Christian Science Monitor.
  25. ↑ Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (December 22, 2015). "Flourishing in the Company of Like-Minded People". The Humanist.
  26. ↑ Jacoby, Susan. "Atheists – naughty and nice – should define themselves". The Washington Post.
  27. ↑ Sage Center for the Study of the Mind, "Distinguished Fellows for 2013-2014"
  28. ↑ ""Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Named 2014 National Humanities Medal Recipient". New York University . September 3, 2015.
  29. ↑ "Global Future Councils". World Economic Forum.
  30. ↑ Board
  31. ↑ "Articles, Chapters & Stories – Rebecca Newberger Goldstein". www.rebeccagoldstein.com.
  32. ↑ "Rebecca Goldstein". www.faithstreet.com. Retrieved 2015-11-02.
  33. 1 2 3 Luke Ford, "Interview with Novelist Rebecca Goldstein - The Mind-Body Problem", conducted by phone April 11, 2006, transcript posted at lukeford.net
  34. ↑ Crace, John (June 17, 2008). "Interview: Harvard University's Steven Pinker". The Guardian. London.
  35. ↑ "President Obama Awards 2014 National Humanities Medal". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2 September 2015.
  36. ↑ "Rebecca Goldstein receives the Richard Dawkins Award at the Atheist Alliance of America convention
  37. ↑ "Rebecca Goldstein | The Montgomery Fellows". montgomery.dartmouth.edu. 5 January 2017. Retrieved 2020-01-28.
  38. ↑ "Rebecca Newberger Goldstein". Moment Magazine - The Next 5,000 Years of Conversation Begin Here. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  39. ↑ "Romancing Spinoza | Whitney Humanities Center". whc.yale.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  40. ↑ "Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: secular humanist with a soul". The Christian Science Monitor. 2011-06-10. ISSN   0882-7729 . Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  41. ↑ Seering, Lauryn (April 2011). "Rebecca Newberger Goldstein – Freedom From Religion Foundation". ffrf.org. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  42. ↑ "The Miller Scholarship | Santa Fe Institute". www.santafe.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  43. ↑ "Redirect". www.secularhumanism.org.
  44. ↑ "Fellows – Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study". Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. 2018. Retrieved January 25, 2018.
  45. ↑ "Jim Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation – Fellows". Jim Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 2017. Retrieved January 25, 2018.
  46. ↑ "Koret Foundation -". Koret Foundation.
  47. ↑ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter G" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  48. ↑ "Rebecca Goldstein – MacArthur Foundation". www.macfound.org. Retrieved 2020-01-28.
  49. ↑ "Edward Lewis Wallant Award | University of Hartford". www.hartford.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  50. ↑ "Rebecca Newberger Goldstein bio". Archived from the original on 2007-09-28. Retrieved 2007-09-12.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.