With these unequivocal words, Hans-Georg Gadamer explores the layers of interpretation and misinterpretation that have built up over twenty-five hundred years of pre-socratic scholarship. Moving easily from such ancient interpreters as Simplicius and Diogenes Laertius to the nineteenth-century German historicists to Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Gadamer presents here his only book-length work on philosophy before Plato and Aristotle and one of only a few extended treatments of the pre-socratics in his entire body of work.