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 èצӰ, home to . Professor Landy co-hosts the nationally syndicated radio show "." From 2013 to 2019, he was the director of the program at èצӰ.
Professor Landy is the author of (Oxford, 2024; in hardcover as , 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 (èצӰ, 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 , with Michael Saler on , with John Perry and Ken Taylor on , and with Alexander Nehamas on ) 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). As of 2024, he is the Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
Notable published articles include:
- ,” Poetics Today 33:2 (2012):167-214.
- “,” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Approaches to Literature, ed. Lisa Zunshine, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 559-80.
- “,” New Literary History 51:1 (2020):145-76.
- “,” Critical Inquiry 37:3 (2011): 497-514.
- “,” Republics of Letters 3:1 (2012).
- “,” ’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Tzachi Zamir, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018: 154-87.
- “,” Philosophy and Literature 46:1 (2022): 137-61.
