“It is indeed puzzling that so many modern philosophers should sniff at the very term “nature” as an injection of mysticism and the supernatural.” - That it is. lol
I’m sorry, your objection is nonsensical to me. What exactly is wrong with this? (Footnotes from the source you quoted).
[18] Henry B. Veatch, in his For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 7, states:
Recourse must be had to an older notion than that which has now come to be in fashion among contemporary scientists and philosophers of science… Surely, in that everyday world of common-sense existence in which, as human beings, and for all of our scientific sophistication, we can hardly cease to live and move and have our being, we do indeed find ourselves constantly invoking an older and even a decidedly common sense notion of “nature” and “natural law.” For don’t we all recognize that a rose is different from an eggplant, and a man from a mouse, and hydrogen from manganese? To recognize such differences in things is surely to recognize that they behave differently: one doesn’t expect of a man quite the same things that one does of a mouse, and vice versa. Moreover, the reason our expectations thus differ as to what various types of things or entities will do, or how they will act and react, is simply that they just are different kinds of things. They have different “natures,” as one might say, using the old-fashioned terminology.
Leo Strauss (Natural Right and History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953]) adds:
Socrates deviated from his predecessors by identifying the science of … everything that is, with the understanding of what each of the beings is. For “to be” means “to be something” and hence to be different from things which are “something else”: “to be” means therefore “to be a part” (p. 122).
[19] For a defense of the concept of nature, see Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 71–81.
[20] See H.W.B. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), pp. 407–9. For a hard-hitting defense of the view that causation states a necessary relation among entities, see R. Harre and E. H. Madden, Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975).
[21] See Murray N. Rothbard, Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (San Francisco: Cato Institute, 1979), p. 5.