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hhhm, yes.

My own thesis is Plato gave us the Rationalist school, and Aristotle the Emprical school. (Well, not my thesis, more the analysis of philosophy makes it clear, and commentators have used that division; Aristotle was more the real scientist, Plato the cogitator and debater.) The Rationalists trust reason over experience; empiricists the other way around. Rationalism leads to Descartes-style skepticism of all experience (think of Plato's cave analogy); which in turn becomes a solvent for erasing common sense and one's experience. Empiricism is about trusting the senses enough that you can make sense of the world . It leads to a more sure sense of the *objective reality* of the world. The skeptics (derived from excessive 'rationalism') so distrust the senses, they end up thinking that since no knowledge is certain there is no real knowledge. (This is a confusion of knowledge and certainty, which are 2 different things). Others go off in the direction of assuming all truth is relative, since it is only in the internal mental state (this is a confusion of truth about things versus knowledge about things).

Yet in the end, reality exists, and our understanding of it, always imperfect, can be gained through experience.

The French went the rationalist way in 17th C from Descartes on down, the British (Hume, Locke) went the empirical way. Empiricism gives us "natural rights"; rationalism gives us constructed "ideologies" - ie all the modern "isms". The French rationalists gave us the reign of terror and the path to totalitariansim. British empiricism led to the bill of rights, evolving and organic societal improvement, Burke, Adam Smith, and USA. Conservatives of the Burkean type are necessarily empricists and empiricism also leads you to more pragmatic and less dogmatic ways of thinking - follow the facts, not your internal construction of world-view.

Our fight against modern leftism is rooted in a fight of empiricism and faith in objective reality and morals against the 'rationalist' creed of internal world-views that discard the possibility of objective truth in some cases, and in others demand that truth is hidden or misunderstood ("false consciousness"). It leds to many ideals that defy common sense (because they defy objective reality).

So choose empiricism over rationalism. And Plato is on the wrong side of the political fence.

It is perhaps possible as Conservatives that we could fell all *isms* in one fell swoop by sweeping away the Rationalist underpinnings of ideology. Ideas are not superior to the experience of reality.