Abstract

Aristotle is famous for saying that poetry is more philosophic than history. Heidegger was only being a good Aristotelian when he began a lecture course on Aristotle by remarking that "Aristotle was born, he thought, and he died": biography, after all, is only a species of history. How comes it, then, that Gadamer, Heidegger's most celebrated student, should have published an autobiography? To paraphrase his teacher, what is a thinker apart from his thinking?