  Plato is the ur-Nativist, so one might have expected Aristotle to be the ur-Empiricist. They do disagree on innateness, but assigning Aristotle a place in the innateness controversy is complicated. Aristotelian thinking rejects Platonic Nativism, in large part because it rejects Plato’s poverty of the stimulus argument. The key here is the Aristotelian rejection of the theory of transcendent forms. For Aristotelians, the form of a thing is not a transcendent reality that the thing strives for and fails to reach, but is rather part and parcel of the thing itself. Material things are forms embodied in matter. For Aristotle, our grasp of the nature or form of things is based in perception, which he understands as a process in which the form of things – the sensible as well as the intelligible form – is conveyed to the mind (and the matter left  behind).[5] So there is no poverty of the stimulus to motivate the Nativist account. Variations on this anti-Nativist approach dominated European thought for two millennia, and Aristotle’s more down-to-earth and less-speculative approach to philosophy is reflected in 17th and 18th century Empiricism. But it would obscure too many differences – especially in their views of perception and reason – to put Aristotle at the head of the Empiricist line.