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Obituary

Aldo Tassi

In a 1984 interview about his play Perchance to Dream, Aldo G. Tassi claimed, “Art has many purposes.  The purpose of a playwright is to change the way we see things.  That is what I want to do: to change the way people think about death.”  In Perchance to Dream, he contemplated the great metaphysical questions of being and non-being, immortality and death, as did Shakespeare centuries before in Hamlet, a play that echoed significantly in Dr. Tassi’s artistic and intellectual works.  Dr. Tassi died on January 10, 2001, just a few months after having delivered a paper on Hamlet and the role of the playwright in theater at The Seventh Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas in Bergen, Norway.  As he wrote in that paper, “the script functions like a summons to which the performance is a response, bringing to pass what has been summoned.  The script, in other words, supplies the action which gives the performance the resources it needs in order to fashion a mirror, in order to re-produce the world.”  The “dozen or sixteen lines” that Hamlet scripts for the players renders him a playwright, and as such, he “summons” the “performance” that will mirror the truth about the world of Elsinore.  More than that, Dr. Tassi argues, the play-within-the-play reveals “the truth about theatre” and the essential role of the playwright.

Dr. Tassi’s substantial contributions to dramatic art and philosophy reflect a passionate mind in pursuit of metaphysical connections.  As he noted in a recent publication in the on-line journal Shine, “It would seem that at the time when metaphysics appears to be coming to an “end” in philosophy, it finds itself flourishing in the theatre.”  The importance of Dr. Tassi’s work lies in how it demonstrates the consequences of the return of metaphysics to the theater for the practice of philosophy.  His articles on theater and metaphysics have appeared in the International Philosophical Quarterly, Consciousness, and Shine.  He is the author of The Political Philosophy of the American Revolution (University Press of America, 1978).  His articles on philosophical subjects have appeared in Philosophy Today, Philosophical Quarterly, The New Scholasticism, International Quarterly in the Humanities, and the Review of Metaphysics.  His plays Perchance to Dream and The Hills were both produced, the former in Baltimore, Maryland in 1984 and the latter in New York City and Buffalo, New York in the 1990s. 

Dr. Tassi had taught at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland since 1972.  Born in New York City, he received a Bachelor’s degree from Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, a Master’s degree in philosophy from Marquette University in Milwaukee, and a doctorate in philosophy from Fordham University in New York.  He studied as well at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in New York.  Dr. Tassi was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for study and research in Genoa, Italy from 1961 to 1963.  He then taught at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and Fordham University.