With Eyal Winter and Rebecca Goldstein

Airs Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015

During this week’s radio show you will learn about:

• The emotion in logic and why our instincts are not irrational
• How we create emotional rules to guide our interactions with others
• Why emotions are an effective and sophisticated tool for balancing and complementing our rational side
• The role of modern philosophy on reason and happiness
• The emphasis philosophy places on reason and the way that affects happiness

Eyal Winter is professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of the world’s leading institutions in the academic study of decision-making. He chaired the economics department at Hebrew University and was the 2011 recipient of Germany’s Humboldt Prize. He has lectured at over 130 universities in 26 countries around the world, including Harvard, Stanford, Princeton,
and the University of Cambridge.

You can learn more about him here.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author of ten books, of both fiction and philosophy. Her novels include The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics, and 36 Arguments for The Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. She is also the author of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, named by Discover Magazine one of the best science books of its year, and the award-winning Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

Her latest book is Plato at The Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, published this past spring. The recipient of numerous awards for both her fiction and scholarship, in 1996 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “Genius” Prize. In awarding her the prize, the foundation wrote that “Goldstein’s writings emerge as brilliant arguments for the belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence.”

She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and been named the Humanist of the Year, in 2011. She is currently a research assistant at Harvard University and Professor of Philosophy at New College of the Humanities, London UK. She also serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on Values.

You can learn more about her here.