Paul Natorp’s Idealstic Interpretation of Plato’s Ideas and Reducing them to the Principles of Knowledge

Plato’s doctrine of Ideas can be considered as the center of his philosophy. From Plato’s viewpoint, Ideas form the essence of sensible things. The Ideas are condition of both the existence of sensible things and their recognition. According to the problem he was facing, Natorp returned to Plato's ideas. Natorp's problem is the invalidation of philosophy and the baselessness of science. He tries to determine the relationship between philosophy and different sciences in order to give credit to philosophy and clarify the logic of governing sciences. To achieve the above two goals, Natorp takes help from Plato's ideas and presents a transcendental and epistemological interpretation of them. Because in his opinion, philosophy only as epistemology is valid. So, Natorp believes that Plato’s Ideas cannot be considered as fixed entities and separated from the sensible world, but they should be considered as transcendental conditions of the actualization of reality. Ideas are laws or explanations that are posited in thought in the first place and then the reality derived from their nature. Now, considering this introduction, some important issues arise: Do Plato's ideas have a purely epistemological function? What is the relationship between Natorp's law and Plato's ideas? This article, with a descriptive-analytical method, while examining Natorp's interpretation, tries to explain that Plato's ideas do not only have an epistemological function, but their ontological and moral aspects are also important.