Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Philosopher and Writer

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a novelist and philosopher. Her novels include "The Mind-Body Problem," "The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind," "Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics," and her latest, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction" (Pantheon Books).

In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow. 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. 

Goldstein has taught at Barnard College, in the Columbia MFA writing program, and in the department of philosophy at Rutgers; has been a visiting scholar at Brandeis University; and has taught for five years as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2006-2007 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Currently she is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

4 min
What Would Plato Think of Crowdsourcing?
Philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, on what Plato would think of technology today.
The Vindication of Spinoza, the Most Lovable of Philosophers
It’s explanation all the way down even though we won’t get to it because the explanations are infinite and we’re finite. That’s Spinoza’s guide.  
The Way We Debate the Existence of God is Different Today
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Religious belief is now something that scientists are looking at and trying to explain and I don’t think it's an accident that the most prominent atheist writers come from the domain of evolutionary psychology. 
7 min
A Marriage of True Minds
Novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is married to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. What have they learned about love, from study and experience?
6 min
Why Spinoza is Back
What the man Bertrand Russell called “the most lovable of philosophers” still has to teach us.
8 min
A Plausible Argument for God?
The philosopher explains the “moral argument” for the existence of God and why it still holds some appeal for contemporary philosophers.
6 min
What Faith and Science Share
The novelist describes the “transcendent instinct” common to both fields, but believes religion has been “pulled along by reason” and not vice versa.