Limiti e significato di 'natura': Tommaso d'Aquino lettore di Aristotele

As Hugh of St. Victor notes in the Didascalicon, citing Cicero, we frequently use the term “nature”, but saying what is nature is not easy task. Thomas Aquinas seems to share this judgment. Thomas writes in a period in which many clarifications on the term “nature” have been introduced, nonetheless across his career he returns on this term and its meanings on many occasions. In his commentaries on Aristotle, Thomas especially illustrates the concept of nature in that on the Physics, but he deals with it also in the commentary on the Metaphysics, one of the last works composed by Thomas (c. 1270-72). In particular, commenting on Metaphysics Δ 4, i.e. the chapter of the fifth book reserved to the term “nature”, Thomas proposes an explanation of the text that allows him to reconcile Aristotle’s classification with the famous four-partition of nature that Boethius proposed in the Contra Eutychen et Nestorium. In the present paper, we shall reconstruct and discuss Thomas’s interpretation of this chapter.