Rebecca Goldstein
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Rebecca Goldstein (born 1950) is an American novelist and teacher 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.
Goldstein, born Rebecca Newberger, grew up in White Plains, New York, and did her undergraduate work at Barnard College. After earning her Ph.D. from Princeton University, she returned to Barnard to teach courses in various philosophical studies. Here 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."[1]
Her second novel, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989), was another heady and erotic work set in academia, though a far darker one. 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, and garnered the National Jewish Book Award. Her latest novel, Properties of Light (2000), is a ghost story about love, betrayal, and quantum physics. 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. Currently she is a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has received many fellowships and awards including a MacArthur Fellowship (1996). She is romantically involved with Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, and is the mother of novelist Yael Goldstein.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Rebecca Goldstein web site. Retrieved on 2006-11-07.
