Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-r6qrq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T19:20:44.240Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fernando Pessoa: The Poet as Philosopher

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2023

Jonardon Ganeri
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural, and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon, the point of departure for Vasco da Gama's voyage to India as commemorated by Pessoa's forebear, the poet Luís de Camões. Pessoa grew up in Anglophone Durban, acquiring a lifelong love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon, from where he would never again leave, he set himself the goal of travelling throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, to be an explorer of inner worlds. He published very little, but left behind a famous trunk containing a treasure trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, mainly in Portuguese but also a substantial amount in English and French. Pessoa is now acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and he has emerged over the last decade as a forgotten voice in twentieth-century modernism, taking his rightful place alongside C.P. Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges. Pessoa was also a serious student of philosophy and himself a very creative philosopher, yet his genius as a philosopher has as yet hardly been recognized at all.

Type
Paper
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 93: Expanding Horizons , May 2023 , pp. 193 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Borges, Jorge Luis, Collected Fictions, Andrew Hurley (trans.), (London: Penguin, 1999).Google Scholar
Correia, Fabrice and Schnieder, Benjamin (eds.), Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crites, Stephen, ‘Pseudonymous Authorship as Art and Act’, in Thompson, Josiah (ed.), Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Anchor Books, 1972), 183–229.Google Scholar
Faulkner, William, As I Lay Dying (London: Random House, 1990).Google Scholar
Ferrari, Patricio, ‘Pessoa and Borges: in the Margins of Milton’, Variaciones Borges, 40 (2015), 3–21.Google Scholar
Frege, Gottlob, ‘On Sense and Reference’, in Geach, Peter and Black, Max (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 3rd edition, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 56–78.Google Scholar
Frow, John, Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ganeri, Jonardon, Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves: Fernando Pessoa and his Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, David, Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
James, William, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures (New York: Floating Press, 1909).Google Scholar
Kierkegaard, Søren, ‘A First and Last Declaration’, in Concluding Unscientific Postscipt, Hannay, Alastair (trans.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 527–531.Google Scholar
Kim, Jaegwon, ‘Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism’, in Corocan, Kevin (ed.), Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays in the Metaphysics of Human Persons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 30–43.Google Scholar
Maunsell, Jerome Boyd, ‘The Hauntings of Fernando Pessoa’, Modernism/Modernity, 19 (2012), 115–137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pamuk, Orhan, My Name is Red, Erdağ M. Göknar (trans.), (London: Faber & Faber, 2001).Google Scholar
Prosser, Simon and Recanati, François (eds.), Immunity to Error through Misidentification: New Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryūnosuke, Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Other Stories, Kojima Takashi (trans.), (North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing, 2011).Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Nuno (ed. & trans.), The Transformation Book (Lisbon: Contra Mundum Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Saramago, José, The Notebook, Amanda Hopkinson and Daniel Hahn (trans.), (London: Verso, 2010).Google Scholar
Thompson, Evan, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Unamuno, Miguel, Mist, Warner Fite (trans.), (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1914 [1955]).Google Scholar
Visser, Rehan, ‘Fernando Pessoa's Art of Living: Ironic Multiplicities, Multiple Ironies’, Philosophical Forum, 50 (2019), 435–454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Bernard, ‘Imagination and the Self’, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 26–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zenith, Richard (ed. & trans.), Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Zenith, Richard (ed. & trans.), The Book of Disquiet (London: Penguin, 2002).Google Scholar
Zenith, Richard (ed. & trans.), A Little Larger than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2006).Google Scholar
Zenith, Richard (ed. & trans.), The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (New York: Grove Press, 2007).Google Scholar