Background
Vassallo, Angel was born in 1902 in Buenos Aires.
Vassallo, Angel was born in 1902 in Buenos Aires.
Professorships in the Universidades del Litoral, La Plata and Buenos Aires. Professor of Theory of Knowledge, Instituto del Profesorado Secundario, Buenos Aires.
The foundation of Vassallo’s thought is to be found in his analysis of consciousness. He regarded as false both the thesis that consciousness is a self-contained realm of concepts reflecting a correlative, intelligible reality, and the idealist analysis of being as an infinite subject. The essential property of human consciousness, he asserts, is its finitude: life is a property of concrete subjects. Yet, while in essence finite, human consciousness contains within itself an urge to participate in a transcendent infinite. Further, this impulse towards the transcendent is the key to authenticity: the more fully we approximate to the transcendent, the more fully is our life realized. Granted this identification of authenticity and transcendence, it will be clear that, for Vassallo, the distinction between ethics and metaphysics is unreal. Much of Vassallo’s thought is devoted to an analysis of our finite mode of being, and to exploring the possibility of our attaining a full and complete wisdom, of which philosophical thought is one aspect. Sources: Dizionario dei Filosof dei Novecento; Ferrater Mora.