It is a puzzling fact that the Greek term for Nature ‘physis’ could be used to refer to (inter alia) i) reality as a whole, ii) the nature (essence) of something, iii) to individual material beings or materiality and iv) all things that are self-generating. In order to understand and tie together this wide array of possible meanings, I will consider the thesis that ‘physis’ was in fact used as a concept of being, a term naming the fundamental property of all of reality in the early pre-Socratics, poets and scientists before 500 BCE. Investigating ‘physis’ in this way can give us a way of thinking about Nature as a dynamic and creative but material process that goes far beyond the classical understanding of Nature as the sum of things that self-generate or the modern mathematical understanding of Nature born with Galileo, dominant to this day.

The work realized by Aristotle in his investigations on the natural world, in particular the biological world, has as backdrop two theoretical assumptions: the ability to organize phainomena in such a dialectically well structured, although at the same time open and flexible way, as the living reality that is studied, and the opportunity to offer to the theoretical knowledge, of axiomatic nature, not only information and tools for the understanding of individual species, but also methods, and its logic, which, if properly pursued, will lead to scientific knowledge. This, understood in the sense of causal knowledge, cannot be pursued in a purely formal way. Our aim is to demonstrate why Naturphilosophen did not get the Aristotelian lesson, up to refuse his teleologism because considered metaphysically regressive.

In the Lectures on the Method of Academic Study in 1802, F.W.J. Schelling warned his listeners against the annihilation of nature. The annihilation he had in mind was not ecological in the usual sense of the word, but an annihilation caused by a certain way of looking at nature – a philosophical annihilation. The issue Schelling had in mind was that of understanding nature as mechanical, or as merely a domain of things, and of understanding humans as somehow more than natural. This paper is set to describe and argue for a Schellingian alternative to the “annihilation” of nature, to demonstrate why, on such an understanding of nature, the only thing which could undermine it is abstraction and to see how a philosophy should approach abstract thinking in order to deal with this apparent problem. For that, different ways to apply the “knife” of abstraction will be then discussed – some murderous, some surgical.

This paper will compare the concept of nature as it appears in the philosophies of the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi, with an aim towards mapping out a heuristic program which might be used to correct various interpretive difficulties in reading each figure. I shall argue that Dewey and Zhuangzi both held more complex and comprehensive philosophies of nature than for which either is typically credited. Such a view of nature turns on the notion of continuity, particularly that between an experiencing organism [Dewey’s “live creature”] and the conditioning environment [Zhuangzi’s “crooked tree”]. Where Dewey’s and Zhuangzi’s ideas about nature converge, one finds similarities in prescriptions made for human action, and in the few places where they differ, one finds mutually complementary insights.

In this paper we intend to evaluate the role that nature has in the philosophy of technology of Albert Borgmann. According to the author, contemporary life has been taken by the device paradigm; technology follows a pattern that transforms the rich dimensions of things into devices; these are composed of commodities, easily available and without demanding any effort, and mechanisms, hiding the ways how natural resources are used. This pattern does not make explicit the promoted notion of the good life. The experience of nature shows how something that escapes the device paradigm can endure and flourish beyond our utilitarian purposes; its eloquence can thus take us to propose a reform of technology through the notion of a center; however, this center demands to be cultivated through focal things and practices in order to turn in to a structuring habit of our lives.

This paper aims to highlight how the philosophy of chemistry could be of help for rethinking Nature today. To do so, we will point out: (1) the co-definition of chemical relations (transformations) and chemical relata (bodies) within chemical activities; (2) the constitutive role of the modes of intervention in the definition, always open and provisional, of “active” chemical bodies; and (3) the mutual dependence of the levels of organization in chemistry. We will insist on the way chemists tailor networks of interdependencies within which chemical bodies and properties are context-sensitive and mutually determined by means of particular chemical operations or transformations. To conclude, we will show how the specific action of bodies upon the Earth at different scales of space and time, and how the relational definition of a chemical body, pave the way for a new understanding of Nature.

In this article, two different claims about nature are discussed. On the one hand, environmental philosophy has forced us to reflect on our position within nature. We are not the masters of nature as was claimed before. On the other hand there are the recent developments within synthetic biology. It claims that, now at last, we can be the masters of nature we have never been before. The question is then raised how these two claims must be related to one another. Rather than stating that they are completely irreconcilable, I will argue for a dialogue aimed to discuss the differences and similarities. The claim is that we should not see it as two successive temporal phases of our relation to nature, but two tendencies that can coexist.

To the issue whether the contemporary formalism could sufficiently provide a dynamical view of natural laws, we propose another way to understand the organizational mechanisms of natural and semiotic phenomena. The breakthrough of René Thom’s topological discoveries allows the renewal of a philosophical path, which examines the benefits of a qualitative knowledge on forms through their deployment. Our study would like to raise the issue of the following questions: in the aftermath of Leibniz’s work, which lessons can we expect to draw from a neo-Aristotelian position in order to objectively analyze the morphological organization of natural phenomena? How to consider dynamical plasticity from metamorphosis episodes, if we only take into account the contemporary development of the Cartesian mechanism? What rehabilitation of substantial forms might help to think about nature today?

A complex global nonlinear physics, eurhythmic physics, promotes not only the epistemic unification of the known branches of physics but also establishes a deep interconnection with complex human sciences.