"Wild mentions the following characteristic traits of "idealism": the subordination of ontology to logic (p.2); the denial of the intentionality of thought (280 n. 301); the view "that all things are constantly thinking, or that there are unconscious or non-thinking thoughts" (214); the confusion of material things with the forms, the objects of thought, and hence the denial of matter, motion, and change (5,234, 238, 290). His last word on the subject is the identification of idealism with "the confusion of man with the creator" (301), that is, with the view that all meaning, order and truth are originated by, or relative to, "consciousness," "reason," "the subject," "man," or Existenz. (Compare Edmund Husserl, Ideen, $$ 47, 49, 55, and M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, $ 44, as well as "Vom Wesen des Grundes" in Festschrift fur Edmund Husserl, Halle 1929, pp. 98 ff.)

I refer to Husserl and Heidegger because they most clearly reveal that Wild's identification of idealism with the denial of intentionality or with the subordination of ontology to logic does not go to the root of the matter. Wild's position is at least as much opposed to English empiricism, for example, as it is to German idealism. Yet he has chosen to present German idealism as the villian. A man who claims to be a Platonist is under an obligation to stress the fact that German idealism attempted to restore important elements of Plato's and Aristotle's teaching in opposition to western (English and French) philosophy, if on the basis of of a foundation laid by Western philosophy."

"On a New Interpretation of Plato's Political Philosophy," Leo Strauss, Social Research, September 1946, 335-6