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Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self – A Dialogue with Jonardon Ganeri
Upcoming EventAbout This Event
On 19 April 2026 at 6:00 PM IST, Poorvam International Journal of Creative Arts and Cultural Expressions invites you to a captivating philosophical dialogue with Prof. Jonardon Ganeri on his landmark contribution to the philosophy of mind, selfhood, and cross-cultural thought.
What does it mean to be a self? And what happens when imagination becomes not merely a faculty of the mind, but its very mode of self-creation?
These are the questions at the heart of Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self — a work that takes as its unlikely point of departure the life and writings of Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the Portuguese poet and prose writer who stands as one of the most philosophically daring figures in modern literature. Pessoa, affiliated with no institution and beholden to no school, invented for himself a radical new philosophy of the human subject. Writing in both Portuguese and English, he argued that imagination is the key to human flourishing — that each of us possesses the power to pluralize ourselves, to live simultaneously and in sequence as a plurality of distinct subjects. He called these crafted inner lives "heteronyms": artefact minds, poetically conjured selves, new ways of experiencing the world.
In Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self, Prof. Ganeri reconstructs this bold philosophical vision with both rigour and sensitivity. But what makes this work truly distinctive is the bridge it builds across traditions. Ganeri traces deep resonances between Pessoa's pluralist theory of selfhood and classical Indian philosophical thought — particularly the Mokṣopāya (or Yogavāsiṣṭha), the great metaphysical storybook of India, with its nested virtual realities and reconstructed selves, and strands of reflection found in the Mahābhārata and the Upaniṣads. Far from a coincidental parallel, Pessoa himself was well-read in Indian literature and philosophy, making this a genuine cross-traditional encounter, not merely a comparative exercise.
This event promises a rich and searching conversation on:
The philosophy of imagination and its role in constructing the self
Pessoa's concept of "heteronyms" and the plurality of inner life
The meeting points between modern European thought and classical Indian philosophy
The Yogavāsiṣṭha, the Mahābhārata, and their theories of virtual selfhood
What poetry and literature can reveal that philosophy alone cannot
The possibility — and the stakes — of genuinely cross-traditional philosophical engagement
Join us for an evening that moves across continents and centuries, from the saudade-filled streets of Lisbon to the metaphysical forests of ancient India, in pursuit of a richer, more plural understanding of what it means to be a self.
Date: Saturday, 19 April 2026
Time: 6:00 PM IST onwards
RSVP: editor@poorvam.com
Curated by Poorvam International Journal of Creative Arts and Cultural Expressions
What does it mean to be a self? And what happens when imagination becomes not merely a faculty of the mind, but its very mode of self-creation?
These are the questions at the heart of Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self — a work that takes as its unlikely point of departure the life and writings of Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the Portuguese poet and prose writer who stands as one of the most philosophically daring figures in modern literature. Pessoa, affiliated with no institution and beholden to no school, invented for himself a radical new philosophy of the human subject. Writing in both Portuguese and English, he argued that imagination is the key to human flourishing — that each of us possesses the power to pluralize ourselves, to live simultaneously and in sequence as a plurality of distinct subjects. He called these crafted inner lives "heteronyms": artefact minds, poetically conjured selves, new ways of experiencing the world.
In Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self, Prof. Ganeri reconstructs this bold philosophical vision with both rigour and sensitivity. But what makes this work truly distinctive is the bridge it builds across traditions. Ganeri traces deep resonances between Pessoa's pluralist theory of selfhood and classical Indian philosophical thought — particularly the Mokṣopāya (or Yogavāsiṣṭha), the great metaphysical storybook of India, with its nested virtual realities and reconstructed selves, and strands of reflection found in the Mahābhārata and the Upaniṣads. Far from a coincidental parallel, Pessoa himself was well-read in Indian literature and philosophy, making this a genuine cross-traditional encounter, not merely a comparative exercise.
This event promises a rich and searching conversation on:
The philosophy of imagination and its role in constructing the self
Pessoa's concept of "heteronyms" and the plurality of inner life
The meeting points between modern European thought and classical Indian philosophy
The Yogavāsiṣṭha, the Mahābhārata, and their theories of virtual selfhood
What poetry and literature can reveal that philosophy alone cannot
The possibility — and the stakes — of genuinely cross-traditional philosophical engagement
Join us for an evening that moves across continents and centuries, from the saudade-filled streets of Lisbon to the metaphysical forests of ancient India, in pursuit of a richer, more plural understanding of what it means to be a self.
Date: Saturday, 19 April 2026
Time: 6:00 PM IST onwards
RSVP: editor@poorvam.com
Curated by Poorvam International Journal of Creative Arts and Cultural Expressions
Speakers
Prof Jonardon Ganeri
Speaker
Jonardon Ganeri is the Bimal. K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He 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 books includeThe Self: Naturalism, Consciousness and the First-Person Stance (OUP 2010), presenting a new theory of self; Attention, Not Self (OUP 2017), a study of early Buddhist theories of attention; The Concealed Art of the Soul (OUP 2012), an analysis of the idea of a search for one’s true self; Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves (OUP 2020), an analysis of Fernando Pessoa’s philosophy of self; and Inwardness: An Outsiders’ Guide (Columbia 2021), a review of the concept of inwardness in literature, film, poetry, and philosophy across cultures. His new book, Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self (OUP 2024) brings the ideas of the Portuguese poet into dialogue with Indian philosophical poetics. He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015, and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year, the only philosopher to do so. He delivered the 2024 John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, entitled Seeing & Subjectivity (OUP, forthcoming).
Moderator
Nilambar Chakrabarti
Moderator
Phd research scholar at Jadavpur University, Sylff fellowship recipent, Former Research fellow at Smith College, south Asian studies.
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