Explaining has been seen by many as the paradigm display of rationality on our part, and rationality as our most distinctive attribute. To be an explainer is, along the way, to be one who can generalize, infer, predict, offer justifications, conform to the rules of evidence, and, in order to offer more ambitious explanations, one must be a theorizer, and a theory evaluator. But other things we do are equally complex and equally distinctive. Such capacities as the capacity to compose, perform and interpret music, to stage an opera, to design institutions and conform to their norms, to write comedies and comedies about comedy writing, are not plausibly seen as merely spinoffs from our capacity to become theorizers. The reverse seems a likelier hypothesis, if we feel compelled to reduce some capacities to others. We might well wonder which of the many things done by those capable of offering explanations are the most wonder-provoking, and most interestingly unlike the doings of volcanoes, whirlwinds, minerals, plants, viruses, bacteria, insects, and most animals. Hempel believes that it is our rationality, that property which, among its other workings, enables us to give and improve explanations, and offer theories of explanation as well as theories about other explananda,that entitles our actions to a special explanation schema. I shall discuss his version of this rationality, and try to see how much it does and doesn’t explain about us, according to his version of explanation.