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Joshua Landy

Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, and Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of English and of Philosophy

BioJoshua 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 a PhD minor and undergraduate major tracks in Philosophy and Literature.

Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012), and The World According to Proust (Oxford, 2023). 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. The World According to Proust (now in paperback as Marcel Proust: A Very Short Introduction) is a reader's guide to "In Search of Lost Time."

Professor Landy has published essays in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Poetics Today, Narrative, 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.

Since 2017, Professor Landy has co-hosted the nationally syndicated public radio show "Philosophy Talk." He has also appeared on the NPR shows "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 Fall 2024, he is the Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.