Joshua Landy

Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to major tracks in Philosophy and Literature. Professor Landy co-hosts the nationally syndicated radio show "Philosophy Talk." From 2013 to 2019, he was the director of the Structured Liberal Education program at Stanford.

Professor Landy is the author of The World According to Proust (Oxford, 2022), Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012). He is also the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009, with Michael Saler). Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions; How to Do Things with Fictions explores a series of texts (by Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Mark) that function as training-grounds for the mental capacities.

Professor Landy has published essays in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Poetics Today, SubStance, Arion, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and other venues, as well as chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Approaches to Literature, The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and The Cambridge Companion to Proust.

In addition to his work on Philosophy Talk, where he has been co-host since 2017, Professor Landy has guest-hosted Robert Harrison's "Entitled Opinions" (with Lera Boroditsky on Language and Thought, with Michael Saler on Re-Enchantment, with John Perry and Ken Taylor on the Uses of Philosophy, and with Alexander Nehamas on Beauty) and has appeared as guest on "Philosophy Talk," "Forum," and "To the Best of Our Knowledge."

Professor Landy has received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2001).

Notable published articles include:

• Formative Fictions: Imaginative Literature and the Training of the Capacities,” Poetics Today 33:2 (2012):167-214.
• “Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction,” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Approaches to Literature, ed. Lisa Zunshine, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 559-80.
• “In Praise of Depth: or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Hidden,” New Literary History 51:1 (2020):145-76.
• “Still Life in a Narrative Age: Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation,” Critical Inquiry 37:3 (2011): 497-514.
• “Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist,” Republics of Letters 3:1 (2012).
• “To Thine Own Selves be True-ish: Shakespeare’s Hamlet as Formal Model,” Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Tzachi Zamir, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018: 154-87.
• “Don’t Feed the Liars! On Fraudulent Memoirs, and Why They’re Bad,” Philosophy and Literature 46:1 (2022): 137-61.