Experiential Self-Consciousness: Rationalism about the Value and Content of Experience

In having a visual experience, we can come to know facts of at least two kinds: facts about our environment ("there is a red cup before me"), and facts about ourselves ("I am having an experience as of a red cup"). How do these types of knowledge---perceptual knowledge and perceptual self-knowledge---relate?;For a certain type of rationalist a visual experience is identical with a form of selfawareness of the relevant visual experience. For you to be aware of having an experience E is nothing over and above you having E. Specifically, the rationalist holds that this fact is grounded in the way a capacity for thought expresses itself in experience as what I call experiential selfconsciousness.;I argue that this form of rationalism provides a novel way of approaching critical debates about visual experience, including the structure of perceptual representation and the grounds for perceptual knowledge. In experience things can self-consciously look to the subject to be specifically thinkable ways: the way experience makes things look to the rational subject can, in part, be expressed through the sort of contents experience makes it available for the subject to think. Moreover, in experience the objects of perceptual knowledge can be self-consciously present to the subject. I argue this type of perceptual presence supports a novel, non-evidentialist internalism about perceptual knowledge and justification. Moreover, I suggest rationalism illuminates an association between experience bearing representational content and a type of selfconscious experiential unity..;I also spend significant time placing rationalism in its historical context, specifically a broadly Leibnizian theme running through Kant's views on experience. I argue that placing a type of rationalism central to a reading of Kant allows us to (i) appreciate the way Kantian intuitions (Anschauungen) are conceptual and yet non-judgmental representations; (ii) see the way sensations (Empfindungen) figure in Kant's thinking merely as abstractions from self- conscious states; and (iii) read the Paralogisms chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason as consistent with Kant holding a substantial conception of the thinking and perceiving subject.