Rebecca Goldstein

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.

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, and that scientific progress is itself supported by philosophical arguments. She has also stressed the role that secular philosophical reason has made in moral advances.

Increasingly, in her talks and interviews, she has been exploring what she has called "mattering theory" as an alternative to traditional utilitarianism. 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, psychology, and behavioral economics.

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

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."

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. 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. A fictional mother, daughter, and granddaughter introduced in two of the stories in that collection became the main characters of Goldstein's next novel, ''Mazel'' (1995), which won the National Jewish Book Award