Christian Thomas Kohl The Metaphysical Foundations of Buddhism and Modern Science

Of course in this action, and reaction, between science and philosophy
either helps the other. It is the task of philosophy to work at the
concordance of ideas conceived as illustrated in the concrete facts of
the real world. It seeks those generalities which characterize the
complete reality of fact, and apart from which any fact must sink into an
abstraction. But science makes the abstraction, and is content to
understand the complete fact in respect to only some of its essential
aspects. Science and Philosophy mutually criticize each other, and
provide imaginative material for each other. A philosophic system should
present an elucidation of concrete fact from which the sciences
abstract. Also the sciences should find their principles in the concrete
facts which a philosophy system presents. The history of thought is the
story of the measure of failure and success in this joint enterprise.
Section IV. Plato’s contribution to the basis notions connecting Science
and Philosophy, as finally settled in the later portion of his life, has
virtues entirely different from that of Aristotle, although of equal use
for the progress of thought. It is to be found by reading together the
Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Timaeus, and the fifth and tenth books of
the Laws; and then by recurrence to his earlier work, the Symposium. He
is never entirely self-consistent, and rarely explicit and devoid of
ambiguity. He feels the difficulties, and expresses his perplexities. No
one could be perplexed over Aristotle’s classifications; whereas Plato