Join SLE for a discussion between Professors Joshua Landy (Stanford) and Alexander Nehamas (Princeton) on Philosophy and Literature.

Alexander Nehamas is currently Professor in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Comparative Literature at Princeton. Before coming to Princeton, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his books, he has translated, with Paul Woodruff, Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus into English. At Princeton, he has chaired the Council of the Humanities, directed the Program in Hellenic Studies, and was the Founding Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. He has received a Mellon Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, and he was recently named a Brigadier of the Order of the Phoenix by the Greek Government. Influenced by the place of philosophy in the life of Ancient Greece and Rome as well as by Nietzsche, he questions the transformation of philosophy from a way of living into a purely academic discipline. Similarly, he holds the view that the arts constitute an indispensable part of human life and not a separate domain, of interest only to a few. He teaches courses on Plato, Nietzsche, the philosophy of art, and intention and action.

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 Marcel Proust: A Very Short Introduction, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, and How To Do Things with Fictions. 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.