Human beings might be animals, but only they possess rationality, language, consciousness, or emotions, which justified and also explained in terms of evolution their perceptions of inferiority and superiority (Mullin 1999; O'Rourke 2000).
Others motivated by post-modern considerations concerning the nature of the self, rationality, language, and identity, are also suspicious of the manner in which the basic concepts operative in liberal theories of justice ("autonomy" for example) are understood as fixed, transparent, and without their own political presuppositions (see, e.g., Butler 1990; for general discussion see White 1990).
Our particular genetic instruction manual generates large frontal lobes, advanced cognitive abilities, rationality, language, consciousness and the ability to choose between right and wrong.
While she claims to write in a plain style so that her ideas will reach the broadest possible audience, she actually combines the plain, rational language of the political treatise with the poetic, passionate language of sensibility to demonstrate that one can combine rationality and sensibility in the same self.
Pyrrho seems to have referred to Homer as a proponent of ideas he approves of, ideas about change, the status of human rationality and language, and more.
But translating is an altogether different task than finding the nearest Starbucks, because machines aim for perfection and rationality, while languages -- and humans -- are always imperfect and irrational.
We are social beings in the sense that in the absence of society and social development we have but inchoate and unrealized capacities, including our capacities for rationality, morality, even language itself.
Just as in the case of qualia, some of the puzzles of intentionality derive from facts internal to the notion, and from the relation of this notion to the others such as rationality, inference and language.
In a sense, therefore, the Cartesian argument for the human-uniqueness of consciousness rests on the premise that material processes are insufficient to account for human capacities for language, rationality, and self-awareness (i.e. the awareness of oneself as, putatively, an essentially thinking thing) — and hence a non-material soul was posited to account for these phenomena.
Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors "mobilize the potential for rationality" given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.
This rejection of conventional forms of intellectual discussion is linked to Stirner's substantive views about language and rationality.
