> "Nature" means, in contemporary discourse, several things, including at
> least:
>
> 1) Everything.
> 2) Everything that is not supernatural (circular concept).
> 3) Everything that exists external to human beings (problematic concept).
> 4) That which is nondeliberative. E.g., a child's desire to suckle is
> natural; building a bridge is not. A dog's desire to eat meat is natural;
> its ability to learn to open doors is not.
> 5) That which is "normal," which corresponds to some essential pattern
> (kindly note that this is the ORIGINAL MEANING OF THE WORD*). "This is not
> natural behavior;" "things do not do this naturally."
Great places to start are RG Collingwood's classic, The Idea of Nature, or Clarence Glacken's Traces on a Rhodean Shore, or Keith Thomas', Man and the Natural World, but Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden has things to say as well... there are, of course, many others...