Dear Dr Ross, In one essay you indicate are going back to Plato and Plato coincides with Kant in some ways. So Plato could have answered the question how the forms participate with individuals -he could have answered the representation makes the object possible and the object makes the representation possible. Is this in fact an answer that Plato could have given to the question of Aristotle?
Plato was thinking in metaphysical rather than epistemological terms. So there is no "representation" in Plato's system, which is not a Critical philosophy. The world of becoming consists of the objects of becoming. Kant could interpret these as phenomena, but that would be, indeed, an interpretation. At the same time, Plato's Forms as transcendent objects cannot be consistently represented in Kant's metaphysics, where a theory of transcendent objects will generate Antinomies. In other words, God cannot be perfectly free and perfect just, yet He must be both. But Plato's Forms are not God, or gods; and, like Socrates, the gods he does conceive hold no religious appeal. In Kant, this does not mean there are no Forms, it just means that universals are abstractions whose ontological status is undetermined. Since, if they exist independent, it would only be among things-in-themselves, Kant could even say that Aristotle was right, and that the Forms, whatever they are, are in the objects, but then as universals they are not accessible by experience or induction alone, as Aristotle thought.
KR
Plato was thinking in metaphysical rather than epistemological terms. So there is no "representation" in Plato's system, which is not a Critical philosophy. The world of becoming consists of the objects of becoming. Kant could interpret these as phenomena, but that would be, indeed, an interpretation. At the same time, Plato's Forms as transcendent objects cannot be consistently represented in Kant's metaphysics, where a theory of transcendent objects will generate Antinomies. In other words, God cannot be perfectly free and perfect just, yet He must be both. But Plato's Forms are not God, or gods; and, like Socrates, the gods he does conceive hold no religious appeal. In Kant, this does not mean there are no Forms, it just means that universals are abstractions whose ontological status is undetermined. Since, if they exist independent, it would only be among things-in-themselves, Kant could even say that Aristotle was right, and that the Forms, whatever they are, are in the objects, but then as universals they are not accessible by experience or induction alone, as Aristotle thought.
KR
