The aim we propose in this essay is to start research on an inaugural moment – the Montaigne’s Essays – in which the ontological and ethical status of the human, and its (supposed) metaphysical centrality is questioned. The notion of «nature» that would derive from that statute, in the modern epistemology is conceived in an anthropocentric sense. Montaigne, especially in the “Apology of Raymond Sebond”, represents a significant counterpoint to the objectifying paradigm that is called into question today, the onset of another modernity compared to the one that (starting from the 17th Century) has defined the ethical and epistemological coordinates of relationship between human and non-human. Thus, the question that today questions that paradigm, which claimed to express the rationality and universality of modern knowledge on «human» and «non-human», could find a sharp conceptual tool precisely in Montaigne’s anti-anthropocentric thought.
