Noam Chomsky is undoubtedly one of the brilliant polyglots produced in the last century, who continues to engage critically with various issues that bother us today. In the masterly foreword to this book Akeel Bilgrami, a thinker and linguist, explains that this book is 'a lifetime of reflection by a scientist of language' (vii). It is divided into four chapters, 'What is Language?', 'What Can We Understand?', 'What is the Common Good?', and 'The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?'.

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... these questions Chomsky intends to get a clarity about and hopes for the answers of the question that forms the name of this book: 'What Kind of Creatures Are We?' These fundamental questions 'cover an impressive range of fields: theoretical linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of science, history of science, evolutionary biology, metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of language and mind, moral and political philosophy, and, even briefly, the ideal of human education' (ibid.).