Marcelo Dascal

Marcelo Dascal (1940 in São Paulo – 15 April 2019 in Kyriat-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 a Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1995 to 2000.

Dascal has published several articles on the topic, and co-founded (along with Gerd Fritz) a new book series called "Controversies", whose first three volumes were published in 2005.

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.

Another result was a joint German-Israeli research project on the evolution of scientific, philosophical and theological controversies in the 17th and 18th centuries. This project received a three-year grant (1999–2001) from the German-Israeli Foundation. It was conducted by a team of ten Israeli and German Post-Doctoral and Doctoral researchers, and published four reports.

In 1995/6 Dascal coordinated in Jerusalem an international research project called "Leibniz the Polemicist", which was aimed to find new ways to develop an understanding of the importance of debate in shaping knowledge. It was inspired in Leibniz's eclectic and pluralistic approach, according to which knowledge arises out of the synthesis of the "grains of truth" present in every doctrine, a synthesis that is to be achieved through rational controversy governed by a notion of rationality not reducible to logical deduction and yet not arbitrary. One of the results of this project was 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.

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.

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.

Dascal was a Leibniz scholar. He published La Sémiologie de Leibniz (Paris, 1978), Leibniz: Language, Signs and Thought (Amsterdam, 1987), and co-edited Leibniz and Adam (Tel Aviv, 1991) which was selected by the Leibniz Gesellschaft as a special gift for its members. He published many articles on Leibniz, his contemporaries, and his influence. Dascal was co-founder of the Israel Leibniz Association (in Hebrew: Agudat Leibniz Israel) and a member of the Leibniz Association of America and of the Leibniz Gesellschaft.

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. .