I hate to speak for someone else, but I got that impression.  Nearly all of what I have read from Gerson takes the form of "Here is why we should interpret Author A in manner X," rather than "Author A is right about X."  The subtext, however, is often "...and Plato's view (interpreted thus) is pretty awesome."

John West wrote:

I'm inclined to say that red is a power to cause certain perceptions in normal perceivers under normal conditions (whether it's an irreducible power or reducible to certain microstructures is a separate issue).

I don't have a dog in the fight when it comes to color, my only point was that a universal can be instantiated in distinct particulars in virtue of distinct immanent structures.

John West wrote:

It helps to draw a distinction between universals and property-tropes. It's a truism that each universal is strictly identical—both qualitatively and numerically identical—in each of its instances; in contrast, property-tropes of the same type are only qualitatively identical. It looks like you're saying each red thing* has a property-trope of a certain type and that the tropes' respective universal provides the “intension” (to use overly linguisticist lingo) of that respective type.* Is that right?

I'm somewhat uncomfortable using the language of property-tropes, because I want to emphasize that the immanent structures in virtue of which universals are realized may be qualitatively diverse in some respects while nevertheless instantiating one and the same universal.  The example of Word provides an analogy: one and the same piece of software exists on your machine and mine (the universal).  Nevertheless, you have your copy and I have mine (the trope), but further the actual structure of magnetic states on my SSD in virtue of which Word is instantiated on my machine may be very different in some respects to the structure of magnetic states on your spinning disk in virtue of which Word is instantiated on your machine.  This immanent structure is what I referred to above as the λόγος within something.

I also want to head off a confusion before it arises: someone may think that I am simply referring to the matter in which the form becomes instantiated.  Inst

Alexander wrote:

While I agree with a lot of what Brian Davies says here, I think the dissenters have a point and he misses it. Some defenders of classical theism go so far in the "mystical"* direction, that it becomes difficult to see how their God can: have a will to be obeyed, call a people to himself, hate sin, forgive the sinner - these "personal" (and, for Christians, very important) characteristics are what the dissenters fear is missing from the "mystical" view of God. They are not (or not necessarily) advocates of anthropomorphism. They are defending the ability to relate to God as a "Thou", a "someone" who can be addressed, not just as a transcendent "One".

This is exactly right.  The truth is the reverse of Cleanthes accusation: the personal dimension of the human being—his "I," his freedom, his spirit—is an ontological theomorphism of man rather than the personhood of God being a conceptual anthropomorphism of the divine.  I think part of Davies's error here is thinking of "person" and "human being" as roughly synonymous so that "person" amounts to just another concrete kind, but this is not the sense in which Christian personalists insist that "God is a person."
 

John West wrote:

The quotation from Hume represents Hume's total position. It is not Ockham's.

I'm not so confident that Hume is not altogether serious half of the time.  At times I detect a note of irony or reductio ad absurdum in some of his arguments, as though he were turning the tables on a naive Enligtenment confidence in reason much like Klocker says of Ockham.

In any case, the argument only works provided that human reason cannot detect an error in the process of thought that attempts to reduce us to a mere stream of impressions.  But it can detect the error.  Socrates does it through dialectic in the first part of the Theaetetus and Kant does it in the Critique of Pure Reason.  It seems to me, however, that the easiest way is through a phenomenological approach:  If we attend carefully to any perception—which Hume does after all allow us—we cannot conceive it but as belonging to a subject.

Yes, Gerson's view (on this point at least) is mine as well.  Whatever turns out to be the best interpretation of Plato, however, it at least makes sense to distinguish conceptually "substantial form" considered simply as a universal and considered as a particular eternal paradigm (whether this is conceived as an idea in the mind of God as we see it from Alcinous on or whether it is conceived simply as an eternally separable Form).

Edit: I should perhaps say a word about how I do  understand Plato, although I don't wish to hijack the topic.  As I read him, concrete particulars are what they are in virtue of participating in an eternal Form.  To take an example from the Parmenides, all like things are like in virtue of participating in the Like.  Hence "likeness in us" (sense ii) is distinct from "likeness itself by itself" (sense iii).  If we take all the particular likes we have the class of likes and can therefore identify by abstraction their common feature (sense i).  A failure on the part of Young Socrates to distinguish sense (i) and sense (iii) leads to the famous likeness regress at Parmenides 132d.