Full Description
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is the quintessential philosophical outsider. Affiliated to no institution, and associated with no traditional school, in his prose fiction and poetry, Pessoa invented a new philosophy of the human subject, arguing that imagination is key to human flourishing and human self-enrichment. Each of us, he claimed, can use our powers of imagination to "pluralise ourselves;" that is to say, to live, simultaneously and in sequence, as a plurality of distinct subjects. Calling these artefact minds "heteronyms", Pessoan synthetic selves are new ways poetically to experience the world.
In this study of the philosophical thought of Pessoa, philosopher Jonardon Ganeri highlights connections between Pessoa with earlier philosophical poets, from Keats to Shakespeare and from Coleridge to Whitman. Ganeri emphasises Pessoa's originality in his theory of the human subject as a radical departure from the history of Christian or Islamic thought, highlighting affinities with ideas from works of philosophical fiction in classical India through an examination of Pessoa's own engagement with Indian poetry and philosophy. Ganeri convincingly argues for the need to consider Pessoa's writings as a philosopher, both on their own terms and as in deep conversation with the tradition of Indian thought.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Poets And Plurals
Chapter 1: Be Plural! A Poet's Creed
Chapter 2: Self-Estrangement
Part II: Varieties of Heteronymous Experience
Chapter 3: Artefact Minds
Chapter 4: A Life Lived in Serial, And In Parallel
Part III: Make-Believe and The Moksopaya
Chapter 5: Reality++
Chapter 6: Names Used Twice Over
Part IV: Pessoa's Imaginary India
Chapter 7: Pessoa in India
Chapter 8: 'One Intellectual Breeze'
Glossary
Bibliography
Index