Joshua Landy

Joshua Landy (email, website) is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford University Press, 2004), and 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. Professor Landy's next book will be entitled How To Do Things With Fictions. It will argue that the key benefit from engagement with literary texts is neither increased knowledge nor increased virtue (in the moral sense) but the fine-tuning of specific cognitive capacities.