Marcelo Dascal

Marcelo Dascal (; 1940 in São Paulo – 15 April 2019 in Kiryat-Ono, Israel) was a Brazilian-born Israeli philosopher and linguist, who was a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University since 1967. He also served as Dean of the Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities from 1995 to 2000.

Academic career Marcelo Dascal graduated from a philosophy and electrical engineering faculty at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He studied linguistics and epistemology in Aix-en-Provence (France) and obtained his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.

In Israel he became a teacher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. At this university he founded and led the Department of Philosophy. Starting from 1967 he taught at Tel Aviv University, where he became a full professor in 1991.

Abroad, he taught at different well-known educational institutions such as the University of São Paulo, Brasília, Campinas and Unisinos (Brazil), Lisboa (Portugal), Lugano (Switzerland), Massachusetts (Amherst), California (Berkeley), Monash (Melbourne, Australia), UNAM and UAM (Mexico), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), Università degli Studi di Bologna (Italy), and others.

In addition to his undergraduate teaching, he supervised thirteen completed Ph.D. dissertations.

He took part in many scientific meetings all around the world, often being invited as a keynote speaker.

He was a member of the board of many scientific associations and journals and the President of the New Israeli Philosophical Association and of the International Association for the Study of Controversies.

He held research positions at the universities of Indiana, Stuttgart, Bochum, Technische Univ. Berlin, UNED (Madrid) and the Centre d'Etudes de la Philosophie Moderne (CNRS, Paris), and conducted research on the pragmatics of native languages in the Amazon area. In 1985–1986 he was a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (Wassenaar) and in 1994–1995 he was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the winter term of 2002/3, he was granted the Leibniz Professorship at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Leipzig University (Germany), where he was the first Leibniz scholar to hold this position.

DOne of the upshots of this project has been the creation of the International Association for the Study of Controversies (IASC, read I ASK). The Association has conducted since 1996 yearly workshops and conferences.

Philosophy of language, pragmatics and cognitive science In the philosophy of language, Dascal's work focused on the theory of language use, i.e., pragmatics. He contributed both to sociopragmatics and to psychopragmatics (a concept he created), as well as securing a proper philosophical foundation for these two branches and for their distinction from other components of a theory of meaning. His contributions to the cognitive sciences are closely related with his work on the mental use of language.

He published Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Mind (Amsterdam, 1983), and edited the relevant volume of the Enciclopedia IberoAmericana de Filosofia, (Madrid, 1999) and Misunderstanding (a special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics, 1999). He also co-edited the trilingual, two volume, two-thousand page Philosophy of Language: A Handbook of Contemporary Research (Berlin, 1992, 1995), and, more recently; Negotiation and Power in Dialogic Interaction. A Portuguese translation of his book Interpretation and Understanding (2003) was published in 2006.

In order to foster the study of the relationship between the use of language (and other semiotic systems) and cognition (and other kinds of mental life) Dascal founded and edited the interdisciplinary journal Pragmatics & Cognition (Amsterdam). Since 2005, the journal publishes an annual Special Issue devoted to Cognition & Technology.

Personal life He lived in Israel since 1965. He was married to Varda. They had 3 children - Hagit, Shlomit and Tamar and eight grandchildren - Adi, Lior, Ohad, Noga, Jonathan, Gilead, Almog, and Naomi. .

Published works Interpretation and Understanding, Philadelphia: John Bejamins, 2003