Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a novelist, philosopher, and professor whose career bridges the cultural divides between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. Equally comfortable discussing physics or fiction, she is also an important voice in the current active debates between religion and science, and has been called one of the ''new New Atheists''—a class that discusses religion with greater respect than some other contemporary atheists. Goldstein lectures all over the world and has spoken most recently at the World Science Festival in New York, the London School of Economics, the Bath Literature Festival, and Cambridge University.

Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy, having specialized in philosophy of science. After earning her Ph.D. she returned to Barnard, where she taught courses in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, as well as on the seventeenth–century rationalists, which is when she developed her interest in Baruch Spinoza. It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind–Body Problem, which was a critical and commercial success. Nine more book have followed, seven of them fiction and two of them philosophical biographies, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. Goldstein's most recent novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, was published by Pantheon in January 2010 and has been a critical success.

Goldstein has won prestigious awards and posts in recognition of her many achievements, both literary and scholarly. In 1996, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, the prize popularly known as the ''Genius'' award. In 2005 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Emerson College, where she gave the commencement address.

In awarding her the MacArthur Fellowship, the MacArthur Foundation singled out the unique role that her writing plays in today's culture, writing, '' Rebecca Goldstein is a writer whose novels and short stories dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling. Her books tell a compelling story as they describe with wit, compassion and originality the interaction of mind and heart. In her fiction her characters confront problems of faith: religious faith and faith in an ability to comprehend the mysteries of the physical world as complementary to moral and emotional states of being. Goldstein's writings emerge as brilliant arguments for the belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence.''

Goldstein lives in Boston and in Truro, Massachusetts, with her husband, the renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker.

Works by this Speaker

36 Arguments for the Existence of God

After Cass Seltzer’s book becomes a surprise best seller, he’s dubbed “the atheist with a soul” and becomes a celebrity. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum, “the goddess of game theory,” and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. And he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his mentor and professor—a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism—and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius who is heir to the leadership of a Hasidic sect. Each encounter reinforces Cass’s theory that the religious impulse spills over into life at large.
 
36 Arguments for the Existence of God plunges into the great debate of our day: the clash between faith and reason. World events are being shaped by fervent believers at home and abroad, while a new atheism is asserting itself in the public sphere. On purely intellectual grounds the skeptics would seem to have everything on their side. Yet people refuse to accept their seemingly irrefutable arguments and continue to embrace faith in God as their source of meaning, purpose, and comfort.
 
Through the enchantment of fiction, award-winning novelist and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein shows that the tension between religion and doubt cannot be understood through rational argument alone. It also must be explored from the point of view of individual people caught in the raptures and torments of religious experience in all their variety.
 
Using her gifts in fiction and philosophy, Goldstein has produced a true crossover novel, complete with a nail-biting debate (“Resolved: God Exists”) and a stand-alone appendix with the thirty-six arguments (and responses) that propelled Seltzer to stardom.

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Betraying Spinoza

In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza’s progeny.

In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition’s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe’s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.

Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

The early twentieth century saw several blows to the assumptions that underlie classical physics and mathematics. Relativity overthrew established concepts of space and time. The nature of the quantum world challenged basic notions of cause and effect. And, most explosively, given the fundamental importance of mathematics to all of science, the remarkable theorem of incompleteness uncovered an unbridgeable gap in all attempts to systematize mathematical reasoning, a result that appears almost paradoxical. The genius behind this discovery was Kurt Gödel, himself a man a paradox. He was the greatest logician since Aristotle, as well as Einstein's closest intellectual companion during Einstein's last years. But he was also deeply eccentric and given to paranoiac delusions that ultimately led to his tragic death. Goldstein, using her skills as a novelist and her insights as a philosopher of science, makes Gödel's theorems and their mind-bending implications comprehensible, while bringing this eccentric, tortured genius to life.

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Mazel

Mazel is the Yiddish word for luck, and, according to Sasha Saunder, mazel is the great confounder of order and predictability. And Sasha should know, since the twists and turns of her life are anything but predictable. A rabbi's daughter, she leaves her family's rural Polish shtetl for the excitement of prewar Warsaw. There she joins a troupe of brilliant young Yiddish actors intent on creating new theater from old experience. Out of an audition gone wrong Sasha becomes a star, adored and celebrated. Brimming with stories within stories, Sasha's life covers almost eighty years and brings her from the Old World to the New. Mazel is the legacy she passes down to her daughter, Chloe, a freethinker of the sixties, and to her granddaughter, Phoebe, a mathematician of the nineties.

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The Mind–Body Problem

''I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius.'' So begins this novel that became a cult best seller and has contributed various phrases to the vocabulary, including the idea of the ''mattering map.'' Beautiful and headstrong, Renee Feuer grew up in an intensely orthodox Jewish household, and when she gets to college one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions and prohibitions of her background. Eventually, she marries Noam Himmel, a world–renowned mathematician. She is intoxicated by Himmel's fame and power, enthralled by the legends of his genius. They fall in love and marry. And here the real trouble begins, for Renee discovers that being married to a genius is a less elevating experience than she expected.

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Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics

This novel carries the reader into the heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light. Caught in the entanglements of erotic and intellectual passion are three physicists: Samuel Mallach is a brilliant theoretician unhinged by the professional glory he feels has been stolen from him; Dana is his intriguing and gifted daughter, whose desperate devotion to her father contributes to the tragic undoing of Justin Childs, her lover and her father's protégé. All three are working together to solve some of the deepest and most controversial problems in quantum mechanics, problems that challenge our understanding of the ''real world'' and of the nature of time. The book grapples with these elusive mysteries, but at its heart is a fiery love story of startling urgency. For these characters, the passion to know is, like the desire for love, full of terrible risk, holding out possibilities for tragedy as well as for ecstasy.

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Strange Attractors: Stories

A mathematician studies the geometry of soap bubbles and responds to the rapture of infatuation by reciting Shakespeare in Yiddish. A group of Olympian intellects is made childlike by the appearance of a double rainbow in a Parisian sky. Becky Sharp steps out of the pages of Vanity Fair to confound a pretentious philosopher. These are just some of the marvelous and unlikely things that happen in Strange Attractors—a collection of stories that explores the interactions of thought and feeling, mind and heart, to reveal the deep and mysterious ties between seemingly unrelated lives.

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The Dark Sister

Hedda, a writer of angry feminist novels, has fled New York City to write in solitude in an old house on the coast of Maine. Her only interruptions come in unwelcome phone calls from her self–absorbed and many–times–married sister, Stella, describing sessions with her psychoanalyst. Between these sisters there is anger and disdain, but there are also childhood traumas and secrets that inexorably link them—just as there are between the two Victorian sisters about whom Hedda is writing, one of them in mortal danger from her diseased mind. No less a figure than William James, the great psychologist of Harvard and the older brother of novelist Henry James, has become involved in trying to help these two sisters. But which of the sisters, both contemporary and Victorian, is most in need of help? With its overlapping stories and unsettling dualities, The Dark Sister is a compelling blend of philosophy and dark humor.

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The Late–Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind

Eva Mueller, forty–six years old, a beautiful, ethereal seemingly unapproachable emigrée from Germany, teaches philosophy at an American university. Mistrustful of life's pleasures, Eva is content to live alone with her thoughts and her books. Teaching is her life—she has left feeling behind for good. Yet somehow, unaccountably, she finds herself becoming fatally drawn to one of her students, a warm, exuberant, still untried boy of twenty. Although Eva is circumspect when Michael Field first comes to her about a summer tutorial, his candor intrigues her and she agrees to take him on. They meet every Friday afternoon, cautiously at first, but with each new encounter Eva finds her reserve giving way, and as the summer lengthens, her infatuation becomes an overwhelming obsession.

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