In his The Open: Man and Animal Giorgio Agamben's concept of the "anthropological machine," refers to a political device for producing the recognition of the human.

He says that the classical ways of distinguishing humans from animals (rationality for the Greeks) are foreign to us, and most people don’t care about modern science and the way that it says that human beings differ from other primates in minor physiological ways.

Heidegger argues that human beings differ from animals not because of rationality or physiology, but because they are world-forming. That is, human beings are open to the world, or may question the world, in a way that animals cannot be or do.