Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Tallis in Wonderland

Homo Faber

Raymond Tallis makes much out of human tool use.

A recurrent theme of these columns has been the fundamental difference between humans and the rest of the natural world. Not long ago, those who, like me, wanted to highlight these differences, could appeal to the use of tools; to the way that we employ inanimate objects to enhance the capacities of our bodies and solve problems. In recent decades, evidence has emerged that seems to challenge this basis for our claim to uniqueness.

For some, the assertion that animals do not use tools has always been undermined even by ordinary observations of the lives of the beasts. Are not beavers’ dams, birds’ nests, bees’ honeycombs, and spiders’ webs tools of a sort? Not in the sense that matters.

…