At opposite ends of over two millenia Hegel and Aristotle, virtually alone of the great European thinkers, consciously attempted to criticize and develop the thought of their predecessors into systems of their own. Both were thus committed in principle to the view that philosophy in each age of civilization is at once a product, a criticism, and a recon struction of the values and insights of its own past; that the fertile mind can only beget anew when it has acknowledged and understood a line of ancestors which has led to its begetting; that the thinker as little as the artist can start with...