Erich Rast is a senior researcher at IFILNOVA Institute of Philosophy of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has contributed to various research projects on contextualism and the pragmatics and semantics of evaluative language and as the P.I. of the national research project on Values in Argumentative Discourse (2016-19) funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. His current research is focused on the (meta-)semantics and pragmatics of evaluative terms such as ‘good’, on theories of value structure and their relation to decision making, and on the nature of value-based disagreement. Rast has published a book on indexicality and written numerous articles on linguistic context-dependence, type-driven semantics for quantifier domain restriction, and abductive reasoning in higher-order logics. He has also worked on philosophical and formal aspects of value disagreement, value structure, philosophical aspects of de se attitudes, and the role of computationalism in the philosophy of mind.
Rast has studied philosophy and general linguistics at the Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen, at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at the Technical University of Berlin. He received his Ph.D. in 2007 at Roskilde University for a thesis on indexicals and reference (supervisor: Andur Pedersen). Since 2008 he works under varying contracts and scholarships as a researcher at IFILNOVA.
