Abstract

This paper aims at questioning the role of image and imagination in Descartes’ Metaphysics, especially in the Meditations on First Philosophy, by holding both a certain doctrinal or theoretical discourse on image/imagination and the Cartesian use of images/imagination. Besides the fact that this rarely considered perspective prevents from freezing the original text, this strategy allows to highlight the ambiguity of theses notions, revealed through what is doing by the act of imagining compared to the act of conceiving with the understanding