 In the case of Plato and Aristotle (see Gadamer 1980, 1986a, 1991), Gadamer has argued for a particular way of reading both thinkers that attends to the character of their texts, that takes those texts to display a high degree of consistency, and that, particularly in the later work, also views Plato and Aristotle as holding essentially similar views. In The Beginning of Philosophy (1997a), Gadamer also takes Plato and Aristotle as providing the indispensable point of entry to an understanding of Pre-Socratic thought. When it comes to Hegel (see Gadamer 1971), although there is much that Gadamer finds sympathetic to his own hermeneutic project (particularly Hegel’s attempt to move beyond the dichotomy of subject and object, as well as aspects of Hegel’s revival of ancient dialectic), Gadamer’s commitment to a hermeneutics of finitude (and so to what Hegel terms ‘bad infinity’) places him in direct opposition to the Hegelian philosophy of reflection that aims at totality and completion. It is with Heidegger, however, that Gadamer had his most significant, sustained and yet also most problematic philosophical engagement (see especially Gadamer 1994a). Although Gadamer emphasized the continuities between his own work and that of Heidegger, and was clearly gratified by those occasions when Heidegger gave his approval to Gadamer’s work, he can also be seen as involved in a subtle reworking of Heidegger’s ideas. On a number of points, that reworking has a rather different character from that which is explicit in Heidegger. In particular, Gadamer argues that Heidegger’s attempts, in his later thinking, to find a ‘non-metaphysical’ path of thought led Heidegger into a situation in which he experienced a ‘lack of (or need for) language’ (a Sprachnot). Gadamer’s own work can thus be seen as an attempt to take up the path of Heidegger’s later thought in a way that does not abandon, but rather attempts to work with our existing language. Similarly, while Heidegger views the history of philosophy as characterized by a ‘forgetting’ of being—a forgetting that is inaugurated by Plato—Gadamer takes the history of philosophy to have no such tendency. In this respect, many of the differences between Gadamer and Heidegger become clearest in their differing readings of the philosophical tradition, as well as in their approaches to poets such as Hölderlin.