A Tune Beyond Us, Yet Ourselves” Robert Brandom at Columbia-NYU March 30, 2024, "Live." Questions. 

It doesn't really matter whether animals are paradigmatic cases of "merely conscious" beings. That's, probably, as you say, quite far from truth (but it also depends on what animals we're speaking about). The true gap is between purposive behavior (which includes animal movement), normatively guided practice, discursive thought etc. and phenomena that demand merely natural (paradigmatically, mechanical) explanation. These are two incommensurable modes of viewing various phenomena and, in fact, you could give a normative explanation of various perfectly natural phenomena, like rain falling, rivers flowing etc. (this is typical of animistic religions). But this mode of comprehension is mostly unjustified and useless in such cases. Only cognitively sophisticated creatures, like ourselves (and other intelligent animals), can be usefully comprehended via rationalization. The point is that one mode of comprehension is irreducible to the other.

@@kmerczerwony1739 very good but that isn't the distinction that the philosopher is making here. it's sentience vs sapience. or, in the words of his hero Hegel, "Spirit" is essentially and uniquely human... and I am questioning this as a long standing unjustified bias of most civilizations.

@@edwardj3070 I don't think Hegel ever says that. From what I know, he was a huge fan of Aristotle's ideas about the mind. And according to Aristotle, plants and animals also can be said to have minds.

@@kmerczerwony1739 it hardly needs stating. "Spirit" is not the same thing as "mind"

@@edwardj3070 In some translations, it is. But I'm really referring to what Aristotle called the "soul" and what we would nowadays call the "mind". Hegel, as far as I know, discussed these topic under the label of "Subjective Spirit", so your claim is wrong.