 We don’t need an argument against infinite regresses to show that this version of the theory of Forms is no good: that it is contradictory is the best reason we could have to reject it. Now, that the theory is contradictory and that it leads to an intuitively worrying infinite regress are not unrelated. Beyond the mere ontological profligacy involved in being committed to infinitely many Forms any time we notice that some things are some way (we will come back to ontological profligacy and regress in section 4), what seems intuitively problematic about the regress of Forms is that we shouldn’t get a new Form each time. The \(X\)s are \(F\), so we have the form of \(F\)-ness in which they participate. We then get a new Form in which the \(X\)s and \(F\)-ness all participate. But why do we have a new Form? We don’t have a new shared feature, we have the very same shared feature we started with: just as the \(X\)s are all \(F\), so is \(F\)-ness itself. We already have the Form that makes something \(F\): \(F\)-ness. The regress is troubling because we shouldn’t be invoking a new Form, but we have to because of the ban on Forms participating in themselves. But this diagnosis of why the regress is troubling is really just another way of stating the contradiction at the heart of the theory: the Form \(F\)-ness is supposed to be in general the thing in virtue of which things get to be \(F\), but it also cannot be because it itself must be \(F\) and it cannot participate in itself. So the regress and the contradiction are intimately related. As Nolan (2001, 528) puts it: “infinite regresses of this sort and the statement of formal contradiction are different ways of bringing out [the same] unacceptable feature.”