Description
Book SynopsisThis pioneering volume 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 and modern aesthetics, philosophy of language, transcendentalism, immanence, and nihilism; to Islamic philosophy, Indian philosophy, Daoism, neo-paganism, and 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.
The volume also includes the most complete English translation of Pessoa's text (written by his heteronym Álvaro de Campos) called "Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro."
Trade ReviewIf, indeed, ‘there is something in literature that is out of reach of the philosopher,’ innumerable readers have yet striven to bridge such a gap. Never more timely nor expertly confronted than here, comes a perceptive international grappling with that very dangerous binary of separation which suffuses the intellectual appeal of Pessoa’s own texts: ‘Countless lives inhabit us’ . . . and countless genres, too.
-- Bernard McGuirk, Emeritus Professor, University of Nottingham
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
