Rebecca Goldstein

Ateisten, rationalisten och filosofins prins. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), en av de första och främsta upplysningstänkarna, har gått under många namn. Spinoza skapade ett av historiens mest ambitiösa filosofiska projekt och har inspirerat såväl Friedrich Hegel som Ludwig Wittgenstein, Louis Althusser och Gilles Deleuze.Spinoza bannlystes år 1656 från Amsterdams judiska samfund, och var vid 23 års ålder en av sin tids mest kända judiska kättare. Detta kom att påverka Spinozas syn på människans plats i den materiella verkligheten på flera sätt. I Spinoza och jag undersöker filosofen Rebecca Goldstein människan bakom teorierna och rationaliteten. Hon väver skickligt ihop sina egna erfarenheter från uppväxten i en judiskortodox familj i efterdyningarna av Förintelsen med Spinozas personliga historia. Vi får här lära känna en mänsklig Baruch, på samma gång en hjälte och en kättare. Det är en Spinoza som framstår förvånansvärt aktuell i vår egen omvälvande tid.Rebecca Goldstein är amerikansk professor i filosofi.

Is philosophy obsolete? Are the ancient questions still relevant in the age of cosmology and neuroscience, not to mention crowd-sourcing and cable news? The acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today's debates on religion, morality, politics, and science. At the origin of Western philosophy stands Plato, who got about as much wrong as one would expect from a thinker who lived 2,400 years ago. But Plato's role in shaping philosophy was pivotal. On her way to considering the place of philosophy in our ongoing intellectual life, Goldstein tells a new story of its origin, re-envisioning the extraordinary culture that produced the man who produced philosophy. But it is primarily the fate of philosophy that concerns her. Is the discipline no more than a way of biding our time until the scientists arrive on the scene? Have they already arrived? Does philosophy itself ever make progress? And if it does, why is so ancient a figure as Plato of any continuing relevance? Plato at the Googleplex is Goldstein's startling investigation of these conundra. She interweaves her narrative with Plato's own choice for bringing ideas to life--the dialogue. Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multicity speaking tour. How would he handle the host of a cable news program who denies there can be morality without religion? How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a tiger mom on how to raise the perfect child? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato's brain, argues that science has definitively answered the questions of free will and moral agency? What would Plato make of Google, and of the idea that knowledge can be crowd-sourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With a philosopher's depth and a novelist's imagination and wit, Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he takes on the modern world. (With black-and-white photographs throughout.)

From the author of The Mind-Body Problem a witty and intoxicating novel of ideas that plunges into the great debate between faith and reason. At the center is Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller. Dubbed "the atheist with a soul," he wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum--"the goddess of game theory." But he is haunted by reminders of two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his teacher Jonas Elijah Klapper, a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism, and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius, heir to the leadership of an exotic Hasidic sect. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating, 36 Arguments explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety.

A portrait of the eminent twentieth-century mathematician discusses his groundbreaking theorem of incompleteness, contributions within the famous Vienna circle, relationships with such contemporaries as Albert Einstein, and untimely death as a result of mental instability and self-starvation. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

En introduktion till Gödels liv och tänkande, den man som för alltid förändrade matematiken. Kurt Gödel betraktas allmänt som den störste logikern sedan Aristoteles. Hans ofullständighetsteorem från 1931 bevisade att det i varje formellt system för aritmetiken finns sanna satser som likväl inte låter sig bevisas. Resultatet blev en omvälvning som spred sig långt bortom matematiken och fortsätter att utmana våra föreställningar om medvetandets natur. Rebecca Goldstein, prisbelönt författare och filosof, förklarar den filosofiska vision som var inspirationen bakom Gödels matematik. Spännande populärvetenskap om en av matematikhistoriens största genier. Kräver ej specialistkunskaper.

With Properties of Light, the award-winning author of The Mind-Body Problem gives us "one of the magnificent performances in contemporary fiction, a fusion of the imagination and intellect . . . achingly beautiful, moving, and intriguing on every page" (Charles Johnson). This mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy carries the reader into the very 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, three physicists grapple with mysteries of science as well as mysteries of the heart with consequences not even their finely honed intellects can predict. "Luminous, incendiary . . . Properties of Light is a novel of cool grace and dark lyricism, lit by the imaginative fire of physics and its improbable cosmologies" (New York Times Book Review).

A National Jewish Honor Book composed of seven short stories from the author of The Mind-Body Problem. 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. 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, mysterious ties between seemingly unrelated lives. "A wonderful collection . . . A picture of remarkable depth and complexity."--Los Angeles Times "Electric and compelling . . . Rebecca Goldstein brings a keen and specially informed vision to our world."--Newsday "Rebecca Goldstein again probes the relationships between female intellect and emotion--this time in a sparkling, erudite collection in which brilliant women's minds dictate their romantic attachments while their gender continues to dictate their fate."--Kirkus Reviews

The hilarious underground bestseller about one woman s pursuit of carnal pleasure and the philosophy that gets in the way. When Renee Feuer goes to college, one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions of her Orthodox Jewish background. As she discovers the pleasures of the body, Renee also learns about the excitements of the mind. She enrolls as a philosophy graduate student, then marries Noam Himmel, the world-renowned mathematician. But Renee discovers that being married to a genius is a less elevating experience than expected, and that the allure of sex still beckons. Her quest for a solution to the conflicting demands of sensuality and spirit is a touching and always humorous adventure. Terrific. . . . The first fifty or so pages are so clever and funny that I had to put the book down and go to the fridge to cool off. The New York Times Book Review A terrific first novel . . . Goldenstein is intelligent and perceptive, bawdy and witty an articulate writer of great talent. The Los Angeles Times Book Review"