 Gadamer’s early teachers at Marburg were Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann. Paul Friedlander introduced him to philological study, and Gadamer also received encouragement from Rudolf Bultmann. It was, however, Martin Heidegger (at Marburg from 1923–1928) who exerted the most important and enduring effect on Gadamer’s philosophical development. Gadamer had first met Heidegger in Freiburg in early 1923, having also corresponded with him in 1922. Yet although Gadamer was a key figure in Heidegger’s Marburg circle, working as Heidegger’s unpaid assistant, by 1925 Heidegger had become quite critical of Gadamer’s philosophical capacities and contributions. As a result, Gadamer decided to abandon philosophy for classical philology. (Gadamer was not alone in being the recipient of such criticism—Heidegger was also unimpressed by Jacob Klein and was certainly prone to deliver harsh judgments on his students and colleagues—but Gadamer seems to have been more particularly affected by it.) Through his philological work, however, Gadamer seems to have regained Heidegger’s respect, passing the State Examination in Classical Philology in 1927, with Friedlander and Heidegger as two of the three examiners, and then going on to submit his habilitation dissertation (‘Plato’s Dialectical Ethics’, [1991]), in 1928, under Friedlander and Heidegger’s guidance. Gadamer’s relationship with Heidegger remained relatively close throughout their respective careers, even though it was also a relationship that held considerable tension—at least on Gadamer’s side (of his difficulties in writing in the late 1940s, Gadamer commented that ‘I had the terrible feeling that Heidegger was standing behind me and looking over my shoulder’, Gadamer 1997b, 15).