Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, where her father, an immigrant from Ukraine, was a cantor. Her family was Orthodox Jewish. She graduated from an all-girls high school whose primary concern was to prepare girls for a life of Orthodox marriage and motherhood. By her senior year she was regularly playing hooky, mostly going to libraries to try to get herself some semblance of an education. 

She married the future physicist, Sheldon Goldstein, when she was nineteen and, since her husband was pursuing his graduate studies at Caltech, spent her sophomore year of college at UCLA. After that year, both she and her husband returned to New York City, he to continue his graduate studies at Yeshiva University and she to continue her undergraduate studies at Barnard College. She graduated summa cum laude and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy, with a concentrate in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. She was supported by a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.

After earning her Ph.D. she returned to her alma mater, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics.  She also decided to fill in her gaps in the history of philosophy, volunteering to teach a course on the 17th century rationalists. Her aim had been to study Leibniz more closely, but to her surprise, it was the rationalist Spinoza who most fascinated her, challenging her analytic bias against metaphysics. Eventually, Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics, became her favorite text to teach, expanding into a semester-length course. 

It was sometime during her tenure at Barnard that, again to her own surprise, she used her first summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. It went on to become a critical and popular success. Writing the novel changed her relationship with academic philosophy.

More novels followed: The Dark Sister, which received the Whiting Writer’s Award and Mazel, which received the 1995 National Jewish Book Award and the 1995 Edward Lewis Wallant Award.  Her book of short stories, Strange Attractors, received a National Jewish Book Honor Award.

She had become increasingly interested not only in the arguments that philosophers construct, but also in the person behind the arguments, and, in particular, the individually variable core intuitions brought to bear in philosophical thinking. Her thesis was that, philosophical convictions being under-determined by both a priori reason and empirical evidence the vacuum is filled by intellectual temperament, varying from one thinker to the next, expressive of their entire orientation toward reality (including orientations that reject any notion of reality). This new focus shaped the next two of her books, both of which are non-fiction.

The first is Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel,  part of a series (W.W. Norton) devoted to great scientific discoveries. The book examines Gödel’s unique mathematical theorems in the context of his deep philosophical commitment to mathematical Platonism. It received feature articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times, numerous favorable reviews, and was named one of the best books of the year by Discover magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Sun. 

Her next book, part of a series on great Jewish thinkers and themes (Schocken), was Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity, which examined the radical thinker’s views in the context of his experience brought up among Sephardi Jews during the time of the Iberian Inquisition. Her thesis is that Spinoza employed Cartesian rationalism to resolve the problem of Jewish history and, by thinking his way outside of religious responses to personal identity, succeeded in seeding the European Enlightenment. The book won the 2006 Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought.

Following these two works of non-fiction, she wrote two more novels. Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics, weaves a Gothic plot around the Byzantine complexities of quantum mechanics. At its core are two problems in philosophy of science that have long interested her: the problem of interpreting quantum mechanics and the problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity theory. Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, is inspired by the culture wars between religionists and secular humanists. The book has an appendix, supposedly written by her main character, which formally sets forth thirty-six arguments for the existence of God together with an analysis of their fallacies. Christopher Hitchens confessed to her that he was using the appendix as his cheat sheet in his debates with theologians. The book was named the best fiction book of the year by The Christian Science Monitor and among the top ten novels of that year by The Washington Post.

Plato at The Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, her next book, alternates between expository chapters, which attempt to place Plato in the context of the extraordinary cultural explosion of ancient Athens, and modern-day dialogues, which feature Plato himself engaging with the issues of the 21st century. (Plato, of course, wrote in dialogue form.) The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and the book was the subject of feature articles in, among others,The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Prospect, the Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic, with, once again, The Washington Post citing it as one of the best books of the year. 

Her latest book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. She had been gestating its ideas ever since The Mind-Body Problem, when she first introduced the idea of the mattering map in her effort to understand the sadness of her main character. The Mattering Instinct is influenced by Spinoza’s own attempt in the Ethics to firmly ground an objective ethics on secular grounds that we can all accept, no matter our theological beliefs, or lack thereof. 

In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize which is popularly known as the “Genius Award.” In awarding her the prize, the MacArthur Foundation described her work in the following words:

Rebecca Goldstein is a writer whose novels and short stories dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling.  Her books tell a compelling story as they describe with wit, compassion and originality the interaction of mind and heart. In her fiction her characters confront problems of faith: religious faith and faith in an ability to comprehend the mysteries of the physical world as complementary to moral and emotional states of being.  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 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Emerson College, where she gave the commencement address. Goldstein has been designated Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association, and Freethought Heroine 2011 by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. In that year she also delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University, entitled “”The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature,” which was published by University of Utah Press. 

In September of 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House. The citation reads “for bringing philosophy into conversation with culture. In scholarship, Dr. Goldstein has elucidated the ideas of Spinoza and Gödel, while in fiction, she deploys wit and drama to help us understand the great human conflict between thought and feeling.”