One aim of a biography of a famous intellectual figure is to place its subject's works in their historical and cultural context. Another, closer to home, is to see the works in the context of their author's own intellectual development. But we must bear in mind that it is the bios of the subject, and not of the works, that the biographer must focus on. Obviously enough, for it is just because the works themselves are still alive, and so don't qualify for biography, that we are interested in their author. Yet it is because they still live that we are curious about the life of their author.

What is the precise link between works and a life that allows biography to be at once both intellectual and biography? Must the biographer's interest in a writer and thinker be confined to those aspects of the life that as it were produce the works? Perhaps, but then of course the actual origins of a thinker's ideas go much further back than to the writer's schooldays or birth; they can be traced as far back as the early histories of the ideas which the works embody. And if the intellectual biographer's task is conceived more particularly, as in Kierkegaard's case, as that of finding out and describing how an intellectual tradition has come to be renewed or transformed by a great thinker, then although the contingencies of time, place, talent, and opportunity that are part of the thinker's biography will enter quite naturally into an account of the genesis of the works, this still doesn't explain why it should be necessary to write a full-blown biography.