“Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves: Simulations of Subjectivity in Fernando Pessoa’s Philosophy of Self”

Abstract: Fernando Pessoa has become many things to many people in the years that have passed since his untimely death in 1935. For some he is simply the greatest poet of the 20th century, certainly in Portuguese and arguably more widely. For others he has gradually emerged as a forgotten voice in 20th century modernism. And yet Pessoa was also a philosopher, and it is only very recently that the philosophical importance of his work has begun to attract the attention it deserves. His heteronymic work, decisively breaking with the conventional strictures of systematic philosophical writing, is a profound and exquisite exploration in the philosophy of self. I will demonstrate the extraordinary explanatory power of Pessoa’s theory by applying it to the analysis of some of the trickiest and most puzzling problems about the self to have appeared in the global history of philosophy. It will turn out that we shall be able to extend Pessoa’s philosophy of self in ways even he did not imagine.

Jonardon Ganeri is a philosopher whose work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His publications include Attention, Not Self (2018); The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy (2017); The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450-1700 (2014); The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance (2012) ; The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology (2007);  and Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian Philosophy (1998). He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015, and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year, the first philosopher to do so.