Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy

Countless Lives Inhabit Us

Bartholomew Ryan editor Antonio Cardiello editor Giovanbattista Tusa editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Rowman & Littlefield

Published:22nd Aug '23

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy cover

This 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."

If, 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 Nottin

ISBN: 9781538147511

Dimensions: 229mm x 153mm x 23mm

Weight: 608g

416 pages