 This is precisely the task Natorp sets himself in Platos Ideenlehre [Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas]. True to the Marburg view that idealism can only be understood by retracing its development, Natorp simultaneously reconstructs the idealistic meaning of the dialogues and the “logical” order in which they must have been  composed.[41]  He takes a double-pronged approach by arguing, on the one hand, that the Platonic ideai (forms or ideas) are in fact correctly understood to have a “critical” sense; and, on the other hand, by explaining why this critical intent of Plato (and by extension of all other critical idealists) was misconstrued not only by Aristotle and virtually the whole tradition, but even, at times, by Plato himself. That mistaken reading consists in taking the ideas to be substances, i.e., really existent things, which however have a purely noetic, or rather, noumenal character; whose appearances (the “particulars”) may be sensible, but which in themselves exist “separately”, open only to a quasi-mystical vision. Kant himself of course understood Plato in just this way, chastising him for flying beyond the limits of reason on the wings of intellectual intuition. 