Who but a philosopher would think it was praising poetry to call it more philosophical than history?

Aristotle's observation is true enough, no doubt, as far as it goes. But what it expresses, surely, is how a person of a certain type will probably or necessarily speak about poetry. The philosophical type of man will tend to see poetry as exemplifying recognizable universals – for example, those of moral psychology; and he will naturally value it for this because he is the type of man for whom the recognizably universal – types, categories, principles, universally valid reasons, rules, ideals and laws – is always more basic, more important, than the particular, the contingent, the distinctively individual, the unique: even in matters of moral insight and wisdom. That indeed is one of the reasons we would call him a philosophical type of man.

Of course, to say this is to express just such a moralpsychological judgment oneself. Nor can we avoid making such judgments. Being occasionally reflective and partly rational, all human beings may be partly or occasionally philosophers.