“Intolerance blooms in the soil of our faulty logic.”

Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. Her most recent book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, argues that the need to matter is the source of our greatest progress as well as our deepest conflicts, and is the very crux of the human experience. She holds a PhD in philosophy of science from Princeton and has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard.

Goldstein has won a MacArthur “Genius” Award as well as the National Jewish Book Award, and in 2014 was presented with the National Humanities Medal by Barak Obama. She has written ten books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, and two biographical studies, one on Gödel and another on Spinoza.

"Rebecca Goldstein helps us to see that so much of our lives, and so much of human history, is driven by the need to matter" — Jonathan Haidt