Abstract
A thinking self, let's call her Sophia, is considering a text. Sophia reads these lines feeling like a well-identified subject before a fixed object. She is a critical reader: she may doubt, and she thinks it is then she who doubts. Sophia thinks of Descartes: his sum refute the potential illusion of the world, its pool of chimaeras devoid of certainty, by placing the entire edifice of the Real upon the stilts of rationalized doubt (Descartes, 1996 [1641]). As Sophia doubts, it seems to be her who, via philosophizing, distances herself from the world to reconstruct the Real from the rational standpoint of the thinking ego, the rational I.