(April 13, 2012 at 11:40 am)ChadWooters Wrote: Who was it that said that all modern philosophy is merely commentary on Plato versus Aristotle? Some, like Aquinis, choose to accept revelation as a supplement to a rational inquiry, but I do not believe Idealism requires a revelatory component. A purely rational inquiry could potentially infer the presense of a formal aspect to reality, or so I hope (Don't worry I'm not blowing you off, GK, I'm still trying to get my nomenclature right).
On the contrary, under idealism rational inquiry would automatically be secondary and inferior to revelation as a source of knowledge. Rational inquiries require the knowledge to come from perceptions and our mind, which, if idealism is true, are imperfect copies of a perfect things somewhere else. Therefore, the knowledge gained by them would by its nature be imperfect as well. Revelation, on the other hand, would be knowledge gained directly from the "ideal" reality and would therefore be better than the one achieved by rational inquiry.
