Abstract: This contribution tries clarifies how at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries there emerged a different form of anthropology. Both Montaigne and Hobbes would appear to emphasize the role of the imagination in the constitution of the self and of mental life, and therefore also the imagination’s role in self-knowledge. They pay attention to various phenomena linked to the imagination, to its role in knowledge and affects, to what we represent and what we imagine to be the powers of imagination, and finally to the use of imagination in self-understanding.
