Rebecca Goldstein

"1656 bannlystes filosofen Baruch Spinoza från Amsterdams judiska samfund. I ett klassrum på Manhattans Lower East Side år 1967 lyssnar Rebecca Goldstein hur lärarinnan på hennes judiska flickskola beskriver filosofens idéer i hätska ordalag. Vid 23 års ålder var Spinoza världens mest kända judiska kättare. Han skulle sedan komma att skapa ett av historiens mest ambitiösa filosofiska projekt. Hans efterföljare återfinns idag bland forskare inom allt från neurobiologi till strängteori.

I Spinoza och jag undersöker Goldstein, skönlitterär författare och professor i filosofi, 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. Enligt Goldstein spelar traumat från inkvisitionens judeförföljelser, och de tvångskonverteringar som de resulterade, en viktig roll i Spinozas filosofi. Hans texter ska ses som ett genmäle inte i första hand på bannlysningen mot honom själv, utan på Europas första experiment med radikal antisemitism. Vi får här lära känna en mänsklig Spinoza, som på samma gång är en hjälte och en kättare. Det är en Spinoza som framstår som förvånansvärt nutida aktuell för vår egen osäkra tid."

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Bullshit, a landmark account of Descartes, reason, and truthIn this classic work, philosopher and bestselling author Harry Frankfurt provides a compelling analysis of the question that not only lies at the heart of Descartes's Meditations, but also constitutes the central preoccupation of modern philosophy: on what basis can reason claim to provide any justification for the truth of our beliefs? Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen provides an ingenious account of Descartes's defense of reason against his own famously skeptical doubts that he might be a madman, dreaming, or, worse yet, deceived by an evil demon into believing falsely.Frankfurt's masterful and imaginative reading of Descartes's seminal work not only stands the test of time; one imagines Descartes himself nodding in agreement.

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.)

This volume examines what and how the media teach, to and by whom, and for what purpose, in a rapidly shifting milieu of media content, platforms, and relations. While intimately concerned with education, authors move the discussion beyond the setting of formal schooling to uncover the ways in which the media contribute to individual and collective understandings of self and other, and their relations to society and communities in which they move. In doing so, the text encourages readers to transcend exclusionary discussions of citizenship to consider participation in local and global geographies against a neoliberal backdrop that marginalizes those unable to, unwilling to, and excluded from competing in the free market. Contributors extend their deliberations back to formal school settings to reaffirm pedagogies that rediscover the reading of texts-broadly defined-in the world through multimodalities. In this sense, the text strives to be transdisciplinary, and is appropriate for use in multiple disciplines and fields of study.

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.

Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesIn 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza’s progeny.In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition’ s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe’ s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.