Abstract

It is somehow usual to grant that Augustine has given a former presentation of the famous argument of Descartes named the Cogito, and we ordinary think that the difference between the two authors is that the first one thinks of the inhabitation of Truth or Verbum, which transcends the ego. The paper is an attempt to think in a different way the sources of interiority in Augustine and Descartes. Based on Confessions and on De Trinitate, I trace the Greek sources of the scheme of the movement of return and elevation, which defines the reflection and the access to the interior through verbum mentis. The distance that Descartes takes with the notion of reflection, in his definition of the thought, indicates an important difference in their conceptions of the interiority.