Dr. René Anson Lézard is best known for his work in epistemology and the phenomenology of visual perception and cognition.

Dr. Lézard was born in 1935 or 1936 in the Congo, the son of a French diplomat. Little is known of his early life and Dr. Lezard is reticent on the subject. Given political events of the time, one can imagine that the Lézard family was heavily pressed by political events. While the earliest we can specifically account for young René's schooling is his enrollment in Summerhill School in Sussex, England in 1949, we cannot say for certain whether the family arrived in that country during or after the war. Dr. Lézard's own references suggest that the family may have been in hiding for at least a portion of the conflict.

René was said to have been a lively child, though prone to fits of dreaminess. His classmates at Summerhill perceived him as having a both a logical and ordered mind and a rich imagination. He excelled at art and mathematics and following his graduation in 1953 he left England for the United States to study with Josef Albers, late of the Bauhaus, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Black Mountain, by all accounts was among the most formative experiences for young René. It was here that he first met Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg as well as the aforementioned Albers and his wife Annie. It was his experiences at Black Mountain, which moved him away from pursuing a career as a gallery artist and propelled him towards his interdisciplinary work in aesthetics and perception. At the completion of his baccalaureate degree, Lézard entered an interdisciplinary doctoral program at the University of Chicago. Drawn by the University's educational philosophy and the opportunity to work with Hans Gelder, a student of Merleau-Ponty's, Lézard found that the intensity of the urban environment was his greatest teacher. Prowling the art galleries and cafes by day and the jazz clubs by night, Lézard was fascinated by concentration of creative energies.

Upon completion of his dissertation, "An Answer to Merleau-Ponty," in 1960 Dr. Lézard relocated to New York. While he was still in touch with his more famous classmates from Black Mountain, he did not become a part of their circle as he had hoped. He was able to get some work as an instructor at the New School for Social Research, though not on a regular basis. Perhaps the greatest moment of recognition in this period came when he was invited to join in a public dialogue with Marshall McLuhan in Toronto in 1962. However, Dr. Lézard himself cites his colloquy with Ludwik Fleck in Israel, in 1963 as the greatest honor.

Despite such connections, Dr. Lezard was unable to establish himself in New York. He supplemented his teaching with a job as a special collections librarian at the New York Public Library, but found the work tedius and his colleagues dull. This period is also marked by his association with the Fluxus group of artists and anarchist politics.

In 1971, discouraged by his situation, and disillusioned by the changes he saw in the United States, particuarly in New York, Dr. Lézard relocated to Paris. While his professional opportunities were no better than in New York, he found the city much more accomodating to his sensibilities. He was an occasional lecturer at the Sorbonne and, most significantly, he resumed his work as a visual artist for the first time since college. It was also here that Dr. Lezard met his bride to be, Simoy Thatcher, a Renganese native, who was studying philosophy.

Small shows of his conceptual art in the late '70's sustained his growing family for a few years. However, in 1983, the Lézard-Thatcher's relocated to Simoy's native Renga. There the family has joined the local sheep collective in the rural community of Oranlooin New South Brittany. Dr. Lézard has described himself as both content with his family life and often filled with longing for his more cosmopolitan youth. In recent years, he has found a more comfortable balance through his active engagement with digital media, most notably the Internet and the World Wide Web.