Being aware of rational animals
pp. 319-331
in: Gordana Dodig Crnkovic, Raffaela Giovagnoli (eds), Representation and reality in humans, other living organisms and intelligent machines, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Modern science has qualified human beings as homo sapiens. Is there a serious scientific theory backing this nomenclature? And can we proclaim ourselves as wise (sapiens)? The classical rational animals characterization has apparently the same syntactic form (a qualificative applied to a substantive) but it is not working exactly in the same way. Moreover the semantics behind is more appropriate, encompassing a pivotal ambiguity. In the second part of the paper, we further delve into this ambiguity, relating rationality with three fundamental features of these creatures: ability to laugh, sexuality and transformation.