2013 Moment Magazine Creativity Award Recipient

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. The daughter of a cantor, she graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, Columbia University and received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University, specializing in philosophy of science and mathematical logic. Her book Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel was chosen by Discover Magazine as one of the best ten science books published in 2005. Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity won the Koret International Award for Jewish Thought. Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away will be published this coming spring.

Her second career is as a novelist. Her first novel was the critically acclaimed bestseller The Mind-Body Problem, and there have been six more works of fiction since, including The Dark Sister, which won the Whiting Writers Award, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics, and Mazel, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award.  Her latest novel is 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

In 1996, Goldstein received the MacArthur “Genius” Prize for her ability to “dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling.” The prize committee went on to say that 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.” In 2010, she was named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

Goldstein lives in Boston and Truro, Massachusetts, with her husband Steven Pinker.