- Nice discussion from FORA.tv - Pinker seems more gentle here, maybe because it's his wife with whom he he is talking.
- Summary
- Award-winning novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's latest novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, tackles one of the great debates of our time - between God-believers and the so-called "new atheists" - and explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety.
Join her and her husband, cognitive theorist Steven Pinker at the RSA for a very special conversation, addressing a fascinating array of topics at the the interface of literature, science, religion and philosophy, including the dynamic between reason and emotion, the role of fiction in intellectual life and the mystery of consciousness.Bio
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.Steven Pinker - Steven Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and popular science writer known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
After earning her Ph.D. she returned to her alma mater, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient Greeks. It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem.
More novels followed: The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind; The Dark Sister, which received the Whiting Writer's Award, Mazel, which received the 1995 National Jewish Book Award and the 1995 Edward Lewis Wallant Award; and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics. Her book of short stories, Strange Attractors, received a National Jewish Book Honor Award.
Pinker is also a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
Pinker is author of the Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, How the Mind Works, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, and The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, among other books.
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