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Mind & Self

Humanity, Metaphor & the Recursive Mind

Brian King wonders what there is about human minds that’s unique to us.

There is a cliché, derived from Aristotle, that ‘man is the rational animal’. While all animals have sensations, appetites and fears, only humans, it is said, have the power to reason. The idea that the human mind is radically different from that of any other animal reigned supreme for over two thousand years. Then it was called into question from the middle of the nineteenth century by naturalistic explanations that emerged with the advent of evolutionary theory, primatology, and eventually neuroscience. The new thinking went, there is a difference between a human mind and, say, the mind of a chimpanzee but it is a difference of degree, not of kind.

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