Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self - Hardcoverby Jonardon Ganeri (Author) Fernando Pessoa (1888 1935) is the quintessential philosophical outsider. Affiliated to no institution, and associated with no traditional school, in his prose fiction and poetry, Pessoa invented a new philosophy of the human subject, arguing that imagination is key to human flourishing and human self enrichment. Each of us, he claimed, can use our powers of imagination to "pluralise ourselves;" that is to say, to live,