The concept of nature is so broad that virtually any idea or aspect of life could today claim for itself the adjective natural. Starting with Aristotle, then with Descartes and Bacon up to modern thought, the Western tradition of a cosmos ordered by causal relationships has built the palace of science; his methods, increasingly sophisticated, today appear indispensable. At the same time, in his results, in scientific research itself, the contours of a sense of perspective, of a limit of view, emerge. In this place we try to place this perspective and its measures of the natural world in dialogue with other possible angles, with their traditions and their parallel paths.