Table 2.

Primary and current definitions of nature in Western languages that have a Latin root, with associated philosophical traditions and synonyms in German (Ducarme & Couvet 2020)

Definition	Opposing concept	Close philosophical tradition:	German synonym
All of material reality, considered independent of human activity and history	culture, artifice, rational intention	romantic and postromantic philosophy (Rousseau, Marx, transcendentalism, Muir, etc.), often attributed to Christian tradition, and formulated by Mill; definition at the root of the great divide in Western academia	Umgebung, Umwelt
Whole universe, because it is the place, source, and result of material phenomena (including humans or at least the human body)	supernatural, unreal	Stoicism, Atomism, Epicurism, Taoism, Thomism, Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza formulated by Aristotle and Mill	Welt, Kosmos
Specific force at the core of life and change	inertia, fixedness, entropy	Heraclitus, Hegel, Nietzsche, Darwin, vitalism, Heidegger	Ursprung, Lebenskraft
Essence, inner quality, and character, all of specific physical properties of an object, live, or inert	transmutation, denaturation	alternate definition with distinct grammatical use (nature of…), too widespread to be assigned to specific traditions (Aristotle and Mill)	Charakter, Wesen, Veranlagung

^:Related philosophical traditions are given as examples, but their assignments are not definitive because most authors can be placed in several groups depending on the texts used as references (especially Aristotle and Hegel).