The fact that Aristotle, who said that the desire to know is innate in human beings, on the one hand admits that knowledge must begin with sensation (i.e. perception); on the other hand, states that knowing in the real sense is knowing things that are eternal, do not change, and that it is not possible to reach knowledge without a universal has led to discussions on whether he is an empiricist or a rationalist in today's conjuncture. As he sees both sense and mind as indispensable elements in the process of knowledge acquisition, it is not easy to give a clear answer to the question ‘Was Aristotle an empiricist or rationalist?’. In this study, by looking at the value that Aristotle attributes to the knowledge grasped with the mind and the knowledge grasped with the senses in his classification of degrees of knowledge, we have discussed which school he is closer to. As a result, although it is true that Aristotle is an empiricist when evaluated in terms of his own hierarchy of knowledge, his precondition that the knowledge acquired through perception is confirmed by nous makes it possible to define him as a rationalist as well. Beyond making it possible, by presenting everything that is acquired through sense to the approval of ‘nous', in a sense, prioritizes the mind for reaching information. From this point of view, it would be appropriate to say that Aristotle has a dualistic perspective in his view of knowledge, but also that his rationalist identity is more dominant than his empiricist identity that has been emphasized in the literature.