matters they intend are seen, to what end they are addressed, in what way they are determined. Considering concepts in this way in fact gives us insight into the basic requirements for any kind of scientific research. Such a fundamental consideration is not philosophy nor its history, still less is it a "history of problems." If philology is the passion for what is articulated, then that is what we are doing. He who has chosen a science must also assume responsibility for its concepts and their presuppositions.
It is in this context on the opening day of the course (May 1, 1924) that the much-bandied quotation on Aristotle's life-which has become an ideological shibboleth against biography in philosophy, especially Heidegger's- occurs. In discussing the writings by and on Aristotle, Heidegger concludes: "In the personality of a philosopher, there is only this interest: he was born at such and such a time, he worked, and he died. The figure of the philosopher or the like will not be provided here" (1).3 Yet the remarks that precede and follow belie the rejection of all but this most superficial of biographies. The use and abuse of this quotation over the years, to the point of becoming a staple ideological shield for orthodox "Heideggerians," deserve to be regarded as one of the most notorious examples of quotation out of context. For it occurs at a point when Heidegger is beginning to draw the conclusions regarding the nature of a philosophy drawn from the hermeneutics of facticity. The interdependence between beings and their being, the interplay of the ontic and the ontological (a distinction in terminology clearly drawn for the first time in this course), is underscored in the very first of the ground concepts (only number 8 in Aristotle's lexicon) developed in great detail by Heidegger, namely, οὐσία. The equiprimordiality of the historical with the systematic in a situated or "grounded" philosophy is asserted almost in the same breath as the above quotation, in the form of the course presupposition that "history and the historical past has the possibility of giving impetus to a present or a better future" (2). The central thrust of the course, that philosophical concepts are homegrown in and out of their native ground, early on falls back upon a biographical facticity which at first sight might seem trivial. But in this context, this biographical statement proves to be no less significant and "deep-structured" than the philosophically relevant confession from Heidegger's letter to Lowith, "I am a 'Christian theologian.'" The opening hours of the course thus draw on at least the following biographical facts, now regarded as basic premises pertaining to the autochthony of concepts: "Aristotle was a Greek," "Heidegger was a German," and "Both are intimately conjoined in the facticity of the Occident."
In his first application (in the third hour) of such a deeply rooted and autochthonous biography at once revelatory of his autobiography,