Rational animal
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Rational animal is a classical definition of humanity, often (though mistakenly) attributed to Aristotle's Metaphysics: however, in the Nicomachean Ethics I.13, Aristotle states that the human being has a rational principle, on top of the nutritive life shared with plants, and the instinctual life shared with other animals, i.e. the ability to carry out rationally formulated projects.
That capacity for deliberative imagination was equally singled out as man's defining feature in De anima III.11. While seen by Aristotle as a universal human feature, the definition applied to wise and foolish alike, and did not in any way imply necessarily the making of rational choices, as opposed to the ability to make them.
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