Leonidas Donskis

Leonidas Donskis is a Lithuanian philosopher and critic. He was born on August 13, 1962, in Klaipeda, Lithuania. Donskis graduated from Lithuanian Conservatoire (now Lithuanian Academy of Music), majoring in philology and theater, and then pursued his graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania. Having received his first doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vilnius, he later earned his second doctorate in social and moral philosophy from the University of...See more

Leonidas Donskis is a Lithuanian philosopher and critic. He was born on August 13, 1962, in Klaipeda, Lithuania. Donskis graduated from Lithuanian Conservatoire (now Lithuanian Academy of Music), majoring in philology and theater, and then pursued his graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania. Having received his first doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vilnius, he later earned his second doctorate in social and moral philosophy from the University of Helsinki, Finland. His main scholarly interests lie in philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, philosophy of literature, moral philosophy, philosophy of the social sciences, civilization theory, political theory, history of ideas, and studies in Central and East European thought. A wandering scholar, he has researched and lectured in the USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe. Dr. Donskis has been an IREX-International Research and Exchanges Board Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, USA; a Swedish Institute Guest Researcher at the University of Gothenburg and a Guest Professor of East European Studies at the University of Uppsala, Sweden; a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Bradford, Great Britain; and Paschal P. Vacca Chair (Distinguished Visiting Professor) of Liberal Arts at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, USA. Currently, Dr. Donskis serves as Full Professor of Philosophy, Chair of the Philosophy Department, and Senior Fellow of the Center for Emigration Studies at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. In addition, he acts as Docent of Social and Moral Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, and also as Extraordinary Visiting Professor of Cultural Theory at the Estonian Institute of Humanities in Tallinn, Estonia. For the fall 2003 semester, he has been appointed a Fellow at Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced Study, Hungary. Dr. Donskis has been published widely in journals, and is the author of seven books, including The End of Ideology and Utopia? Moral Imagination and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) and Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth-Century Lithuania (London & New York: Routledge, 2002). Dr. Donskis's works originally written in Lithuanian and English have been translated into Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Ukrainian. He edits the book series, "On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics," for Editions Rodopi, B. V. Last but not least, he is a Lithuanian representative to the European Cultural Parliament. See less