Description
Book SynopsisThis pioneering volume, for the first time, explores the extraordinary Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) and his relationship to philosophy. On the one hand, this book reveals Pessoa’s serious knowledge of philosophy and playful philosophical explorations and how he has the gift of synthesizing, appropriating and subverting complex ideas into his art; and, on the other hand, the chapters shed new light on central aspects and problems of philosophy through the prism of Pessoa’s diverse writings. The volume includes sixteen new essays from an international group of scholars, analyzing Pessoa’s multifaceted poetic work alongside philosophical themes and movements, from conceptions of time, ancient aesthetics, philosophy of language, transcendentalism, immanence, nihilism; to Islamic philosophy, Indian philosophy, philosophy of religion, neo-paganism, the philosophy of the self. The breadth of his work provides a springboard for new thinking on the aesthetic and the spiritual, the logic of value and capitalist modernity, and ecological thought and postmodernism.
Table of ContentsIntroduction. An Encounter between the Poet and the Philosopher
by Bartholomew Ryan
Exordium
by Fernando Pessoa & Co.
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro
by Álvaro de Campos
Essays on Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy
Spiritual Traditions
1. Antonio Cardiello – Fernando Pessoa’s Vision of Neopaganism as Life’s Supreme Art
2. Paulo Borges – Fernando Pessoa, Daoism and the Gap:Insubstantiality, Emptiness, Vagueness and Indetermination
3. Jonardon Ganeri – Pessoa’s Imaginary India
4. Fabrizio Boscaglia – Pessoa and Islamic Philosophy
Metaphysics and Post-Metaphysics
5. João Constâncio – Nihilism and on Being Nothing in ‘The Tobacco Shop’
6. Pedro Duarte – Pessoa and Time
7. Benedetta Zavatta – Pessoa and American Transcendentalism
8. José Gil – Bernardo Soares’ Becoming-Landscape
Philosophies of Selfhood
9. Bartholomew Ryan – Voicing Vacillation, Logos and Masks of the Self: Mirroring Kierkegaard and Pessoa
10. Maria Filomena Molder – The Difference between Othering Oneself and Becoming What One is
11. Gianfranco Ferraro – A Hermeneutics of Disquiet: Approaching Pessoa through Foucault
Contemporary Problems and Perspectives
12. J.D. Mininger – Pessoa’s The Anarchist Banker and the Logic of Value
13. Bruno Béu – For Your Eyes Only: The Logic of Seeing in Alberto Caeiro’s Poetry
14. Michael Marder – Where does Fernando Pessoa Dwell? The Economy and Ecology of the Heteronyms
15. Giovanbattista Tusa – The ‘Pessoa’ Event: Notes on Philosophy and Poetry
Appendix
16. Jerónimo Pizarro – Pessoa and Philosophy: Texts from the Archive
Critical Bibliography
Index
About the Authors
