Cartesian Self-Consciousness Revisited

When you are in a joyful mood, how do you know that it is so? On a Cartesian picture, the answer is that you’ve got some immediate, noninferential apprehension of your being joyful, such as (i) this noninferential apprehension is analogous to sense perception (perceptual account), and (ii) unlike sense perception, it makes it unquestionable or evident to you that you presently are in a joyful mood (epistemic privilege). In this paper, I defend this view against some classical objections, arguing that pre-reflective self-consciousness actually is analogous to sense perception.Phenomenology of thinking past and present (Crédit classique, PhéCog)