Romancing Spinoza: Why Spinoza Had Little Use for Art and Why Artists Have Made Much Use of Him

Ms. Goldstein graduated from Barnard College and received her PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. She is the author of nine books, including the novels The Mind-Body Problem (1983); The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989); The Dark Sister(1993), which received the Whiting Writer’s Award; Mazel (1995), which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award; Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics (2000); and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010). She has also written a short story collection, Strange Attractors (1993), and the nonfiction works Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (2005), deemed one of the best books of the year by Discover magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and theNew York Sun; and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity (2006), which received the Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought.  

Ms. Goldstein has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Rutgers, and Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has received Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and in 1996 was a MacArthur Fellow. In 2008 the International Academy of Humanism named her Humanist Laureate; in 2011 she was designated Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association and Free-thought Heroine by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. She delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale that same year.

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