The purpose of this thesis is to read the texts of Maine de Biran as a philosophy of the appearance of the self and the genesis of reflective thinking. The first two chapters measure the reach of criticism which Biran did toward the supposition of the innate subject at the time of his "total revolution" of 1804. It is his criticism of Destutt de Tracy and Locke. Two predecessors, presupposing the idea of the self already formed and the reflection already completed, left their researches of the thinking subject incomplete. By critics of these two thinkers, Biran deepened his understanding of "reflection", and based it on the birth of the self. Chapters 3 and 4 examine two fruits of these criticisms, namely the psycho-physiological parallelism which Biran applies to the research on the appearance of the self, and the concept of "reflection" as the process of deepening the internal point of view. Chapter 3 examines considerations of Biran on the appearance of a willing and conscious individual, referring to his criticism of Xavier Bichat. This research concerns the transition between the involuntary and the voluntary, which the spontaneity connects. The last chapter explains the concept of reflection as a formation process of reflective thought with the difference of degrees of depth. This chapter shows that this concept serves to connect the first apperception to the "réflexion supérieure" that provides metaphysical notions, and that this process can be analyzed in two aspects: duplication of the apperception and concentration to the immediate apperception.
