ABSTRACT
The first principles are basic truths, insofar as they are distinguished from knowledge acquired by discursive reason. This chapter takes naturalism to be that perspective where intellectual knowledge and ethical qualities are inserted, to a certain degree, within the knowing and acting subject. Naturalism, thus understood, fails to understand that both wisdom and moral good are activities that always come after what is given: they are absolute gains. From an approach such as that of Duns Scotus, who is followed by the majority of rationalist thinkers, the link between the knowledge of principles and experience is sometimes misunderstood. These are the noetic principles of the classical doctrine of the natural law, which could more appropriately be called 'ratio-natural law', since this theory is characterized by constant appeal to collaboration, without confusion, between reason and nature. And so the proposal of classical practical philosophy would not merely be intolerably uniform, but in addition, luckily, in this case, impossible to achieve.
