ABSTRACT
Ethics or moral philosophy famously came of age when Socrates refocused philosophical enquiry, although many before him oered theoretical views on proper behaviour. The now canonical account is that both Plato and Aristotle held Socrates responsible for an ‘ethical turn’ when he turned away from natural philosophy: as Plato presents it, Socrates was disappointed in the kind of causality students of nature oered (Phaedo 98e-99a), and instead redirected his attention to the human soul (his famous ‘second sailing’, Phaedo 99d-102a). Aristotle gave a similar account (Metaphysics 1.3, 987b):
And when Socrates, disregarding the physical universe and conning his study to moral questions, sought in this sphere for the universal and was the rst to concentrate upon denition, Plato followed him and assumed that the problem of denition is concerned not with any sensible thing but with entities of another kind.1
