In a note to G.R.S. Mead’s "Quests Old and New", where he found a section devoted to Hans Vaihinger’s main ideas, Fernando Pessoa reflects on the consequences of the fictionalist approach to both our perception of the I and the value of consciousness. These questions correspond to some statements that we find in Nietzsche’s writings, which in particular Vaihinger refers to in his Die Philosophie des Als-ob. Our aim is thus to compare Nietzsche’s and Pessoa’s view of the I and (...) consciousness, and to deal with their psychology by making reference to Vaihinger’s fictionalism. (shrink)

This pioneering volume, for the first time, explores the extraordinary Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa 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. (shrink)

In this introductory chapter, we discuss some recent theoretical approaches to the relations between Western Philosophy and Literary Modernism, and at the same time, we get back to some classic contrasts drawn between the two creative enterprises in the foundational texts of each tradition, which make them seem irreconcilable. Recent rapprochements made by commentators on twentieth-century philosophy and the cultural breakthrough of Modernism in the last decade of the nineteenth-century have insisted on a disenchanted rupture with all kinds of metaphysical (...) worldviews, which had theretofore played a stabilizing role in human beings’ lives and in Western societies at large. Usually this demystifying gesture is associated with a concentration of theoretical attention on the role played by language itself. In terms of the development of philosophical methods in the twentieth-century, this has been especially associated with the so-called ‘linguistic analysis’. You could conceive of the linguistic turn as a new metaphysical framework. This framework would equally encompass the whole of reality in a single, unifying principle. In this book we mean to avoid this essentialist worldview by drawing on highly differentiated resources from human language itself, be it poetry, the novel, the theatre or the plastic arts. (shrink)

Produced on the fringes of philosophy and literary criticism, this book is a pioneering study which aims to explicitly address and thematize what may be called a “critical philosophy in the condition of modernism”. Its most important and original contribution to both disciplines is a self-conscious reflection on possible modes of writing philosophy today, and a systematic comparison with what happened in literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The volume is divided into six sections, where internationally renowned scholars (...) discuss such pressing topics as the role of an unreliable narrator in a major philosophical treatise, the different mediums of art-production and how these impact on our perception of the Work itself, the role of narrative in animal ethics and the filmic adaption of a Modernist classic. (shrink)