Dr. Daniel Leonard, Visiting Assistant Professor Doctor
Office: 128-C
Phone: 290 11 11
Mail: daniel.leonard@bilkent.edu.tr
Dr. Daniel Leonard received his B.A. from the University of California at Davis and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His dissertation, “Painted Chimeras, Animated Grottoes and the Feigned World: Fable and Tableau in Descartes’ Philosophy and Physics” examined Descartes’ creative use of both poetry and the arts as tools for modeling physical, physiological and perceptual mechanisms. Its aim was to reconstruct a genealogy of the Enlightenment human sciences based on recurrent artistic analogies such as animated statues, interactive paintings and intelligent musical instruments.
His research interests include 17th- and 18th-century French philosophy and literature, history of science, contemporary philosophy and aesthetics. He is currently working on a larger project tracing the use of both literary devices and artistic analogies in French Enlightenment treatments of the senses, knowledge and human nature. He has given papers and published on Descartes, Diderot and Condillac. He has also recently completed an English translation of Charles de Brosses’ Du Culte des Dieux Fetiches (On the Worship of Fetish Gods, 1760), with a scholarly introduction and annotations.
Dr. Leonard has taught humanities at Columbia University, Barnard College and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences.