Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein reveals philosophy’s hidden but essential role in today’s debates by imagining Plato come to life in the twenty-first century. How would Plato handle a host on FOX News who denies that there can be morality without religion? 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? And what would Plato make of Google, and the idea that knowledge can be crowd-sourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With scholarly depth and a novelist’s imagination and wit, she probes the issues confronting our time, by allowing us to eavesdrop as Plato takes on the modern world.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein received her PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. Her award-winning books include the novels The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, as well as studies of Kurt Gödel and Baruch Spinoza.  She has received a MacArthur “Genius” award, has been designated Humanist of the Year and Freethought Heroine, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Massachusetts.