Una introducción magistral a la vida y pensamiento del hombre que transformó para siempre nuestra concepción de las matemáticas.Se considera a Kurt Gödel el lógico más importante desde Aristóteles. Su monumental teorema de la incompletitud demuestra que en cualquier sistema formal de aritmética existen proposiciones verdaderas que, sin embargo, no pueden demostrarse. Este resultado creó una conmoción mucho más allá de las matemáticas, poniendo en duda nuestra concepción de la naturaleza y la mente.Rebecca Goldstein, novelista y filósofa, explica la visión filosófica que inspira las matemáticas de Gödel, y revela el error en las interpretaciones de su teorema por parte de los pensamientos filosóficos entonces en boga, desde el positivismo al postmodernismo. Irónicamente, tanto Gödel como su íntimo amigo y colega en Princeton, Einstein, se sentían exiliados intelectuales justo cuando sus trabajos eran aclamados como los más importantes del siglo XX. Para Gödel esta sensación de aislamiento tuvo unas consecuencias trágicas.Este libro, lúcido y accesible, permite al lector comprender el teorema de Gödel, dando vida al mismo tiempo a este genio excéntrico y torturado y a su mundo.

In this classic work, best-selling author Harry Frankfurt provides a compelling analysis of the question that not only lies at the heart of Descartes's "Meditations," but also constitutes the central preoccupation of modern philosophy: on what basis can reason claim to provide any justification for the truth of our beliefs? "Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen" provides an ingenious account of Descartes's defense of reason against his own famously skeptical doubts that he might be a madman, dreaming, or, worse yet, deceived by an evil demon into believing falsely.

Frankfurt's masterful and imaginative reading of Descartes's seminal work not only stands the test of time; one imagines Descartes himself nodding in agreement.

With Properties of Light, the award-winning author of The Mind-Body Problem gives us “one of the magnificent performances in contemporary fiction, a fusion of the imagination and intellect . . . achingly beautiful, moving, and intriguing on every page” (Charles Johnson). This mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light. Caught in the entanglements of erotic and intellectual passion, three physicists grapple with mysteries of science as well as mysteries of the heart with consequences not even their finely honed intellects can predict. “Luminous, incendiary . . . Properties of Light is a novel of cool grace and dark lyricism, lit by the imaginative fire of physics and its improbable cosmologies” (New York Times Book Review).

A collection of seven short stories that explore the labyrinths of consciousness, the fragile mysteries of love, and the forces that--like the mathematical notion of "strange attractors"--bring a secret order to the chaotic randomness of life.

Considered the 20th century's greatest mathematician, Kurt Godel is the subject of this lucid and accessible study, which explains the significance of his theorems and the remarkable vision behind them, while bringing this eccentric, tortured genius and his world to life.

Is philosophy obsolete? Are the ancient questions still relevant in the age of cosmology and neuroscience, not to mention crowd-sourcing and cable news? The acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today's debates on religion, morality, politics, and science.
At the origin of Western philosophy stands Plato, who got about as much wrong as one would expect from a thinker who lived 2,400 years ago. But Plato's role in shaping philosophy was pivotal. On her way to considering the place of philosophy in our ongoing intellectual life, Goldstein tells a new story of its origin, re-envisioning the extraordinary culture that produced the man who produced philosophy.
But it is primarily the fate of philosophy that concerns her. Is the discipline no more than a way of biding our time until the scientists arrive on the scene? Have they already arrived? Does philosophy itself ever make progress? And if it does, why is so ancient a figure as Plato of any continuing relevance?" Plato at the Googleplex" is Goldstein's startling investigation of these conundra. She interweaves her narrative with Plato's own choice for bringing ideas to life--the dialogue.
Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multicity speaking tour. How would he handle the host of a cable news program who denies there can be morality without religion? How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a tiger mom on how to raise the perfect child? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato's brain, argues that science has definitively answered the questions of free will and moral agency? What would Plato make of Google, and of the idea that knowledge can be crowd-sourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With a philosopher's depth and a novelist's imagination and wit, Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he takes on the modern world.
(With black-and-white photographs throughout.)

In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty-three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza's progeny.
In "Betraying Spinoza," Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition's persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza's philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe's first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.
Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero--a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.

"From the Hardcover edition."