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Originally Posted by Peter  Thomas Aquinas is usually considered an empiricist. I suspect though that these epistemological generalizations are overly simplistic and anachronistic. Rationalism v. Empiricism was a 17th and 18th c. debate. Thomas thru Aristotle e.g. believed the primacy of experience yet held certain propositions to be self-evidencing knowledge while memory of past events mere opinion. |
Right you are. I hesitated to include Thomas Aquinas as a rationalist, except that I remembered his theistic proofs seemed to place reason above revelation--or at least acknowledged that reason could get you a long way before you needed revelation.
I agree that there are many nuances to the term "rationalism."