(also called Natural Philosophy and, in ancient and scholastic usage, Physics).— The philosophical study of being under the aspect of mobility.  Classically, the philosophy of nature treated of mobile in general, as well as its various species, thus including local motion, the qualitative changes that occur in ensouled beings, as well as the quasi-motion of substantial change.  In post-rationalist pedagogy, the philosophy of nature was often categorized as a kind of “special” or specific branch of metaphysics, and was referred to as cosmology.