La physis e i suoi contrari. Spunti per una riscoperta del concetto aristotelico di natura in Robert Spaemann

According to Aristotle, final causes deserve great attention not only in the realm of human action but most fundamentally in the whole realm of nature, as generally concerned with objects submitted to change. Robert Spaemann grew attentive to this core problem of Aristotelian ontology studying some prominent examples of modern ethics in which the scope of final causes has been reduced to the bare maintenance of survival conditions. Both nature and final causes exhibit in the Aristotelian reflection a much broader specter of meaning, which is documented not only in the neologism which Aristotle created to express this multiplicity, but also in ordinary language occurrences of the adjective “natural” in opposition-couples such as “natural- conventional”, etc. Starting with a reconstruction of Spaemann’s discovery of the problem of “inversed teleology” as a mark of Modernity, the article focuses on his recover of the intrinsic polysemy of the concepts of nature and final causes documented both in Aristotle's work and in ordinary language.