From the acclaimed writer and thinker-whose award-winning books include both fiction and nonfiction, a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden but essential role in today's debates on love, religion, politics and science. Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and set out on a multicity speaking tour, how would he handle a host on Fox News who challenges him on religion and morality? How would he mediate a debate on the best way to raise a child between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a Tiger Mom? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato's brain, argues that all his philosophical problems can be solved by our new technologies? What would he make of Google and the idea that knowledge can be crowdsourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With a philosopher's depth and a novelist's imagination, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us from sexuality and child-rearing to morality and the meaning of life by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he encounters the modern world. By reviving the Platonic art of the dialogue for the tweny-first century, she demonstrates that the questions he first posed continue to confound and enlarge us.
Key Features:
Subject: Philosophy or Plato. Books about big ideas from Dennett to de Botton, Haidt to Mlodinow, consistently have appeal. Readers enjoy the challenge of coming to understand something that might seem daunting at first glance.
Audience: Readers of Alain de Botton, Richard Tarnas's The Passion of the Western Mind, Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind, Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? and Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing.
Author: Only a master of both the literary arts and the subject matter of philosophy could pull off this daring tour de force. Since earning her PhD in philosophy from Princeton, where she studied with Thomas Nagel and teaching at Barnard, Rutgers, Columbia and Trinity College, Goldstein has written six novels, as well as philosophical studies of Kurt Gödel and Baruch Spinoza. Among her many awards is the "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation