Who And What Is Intelligent?

Great thinkers since before Aristotle have overwhelmingly tended to characterise humans as rational animals in virtue of our capacity to form and intelligently adjust our beliefs. On this view, constructing good habits is vital – but, once a habitual routine is established, it is not itself intelligent.

However, if we are serious about attributing intelligence to our embodied interactions with the world, then our notion of how to construe human rationality will need to be revised, and profound questions will need to be raised as to our conceptions of nonhuman animal intelligence.