The distinction between the quantitative exact sciences and those sciences that deal with the causes of things is due to Aristotle, who distinguished mathematics from natural philosophy[10] and considered the exact sciences to be the "more natural of the branches of mathematics."[11]Thomas Aquinas employed this distinction when he said that astronomy explains the spherical shape of the Earth[12] by mathematical reasoning while physics explains it by material causes.[13] This distinction was widely, but not universally, accepted until the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.[14]Edward Grant has proposed that a fundamental change leading to the new sciences was the unification of the exact sciences and physics by Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and others, which resulted in a quantitative investigation of the physical causes of natural phenomena.[15]
↑Grant, Edward (2007), A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.43, ISBN9781139461092
↑"Exact, adj.1", Oxford English Dictionary, Online version (2nded.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, June 2016
↑Friedman, Michael (1992), "Philosophy and the Exact Sciences: Logical Positivism as a Case Study", in Earman, John (ed.), Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science, Pittsburgh series in philosophy and history of science, vol.14, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, p.84, ISBN9780520075771
↑Neugebauer, Otto (1962), The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, The Science Library (2nd, reprinted.), New York: Harper & Bros.
↑Harman, Peter M.; Shapiro, Alan E. (2002), The Investigation of Difficult Things: Essays on Newton and the History of the Exact Sciences in Honour of D.T. Whiteside, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN9780521892667
↑Pyenson, Lewis (1993), "Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences Revisited", Isis, 84 (1): 103–108, Bibcode:1993Isis...84..103P, doi:10.1086/356376, JSTOR235556, S2CID144588820, [M]any of the exact sciences... between Claudius Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe were in a common register, whether studied in the diverse parts of the Islamic world, in India, in Christian Europe, in China, or apparently in Mesoamerica.
↑Shapin, Steven (2018). The Scientific Revolution (2nded.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. pp.46–47. ISBN9780226398341.
↑Principe, Lawrence (2011). The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. p.27. ISBN9780199567416.
↑Grant, Edward (2007), A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.42–43, ISBN9781139461092, In addition to the exclusion of medicine from natural philosophy, Aristotle also excludes the mathematical, or exact, sciences which he characterizes as "the more natural of the branches of mathematics, such as optics, harmonics and astronomy." ...the exact sciences [for Aristotle] belong neither wholly to natural philosophy nor to mathematics but are relevant to both. Because they were viewed as lying between the two disciplines, the exact sciences came to be known as middle sciences (scientae mediae) during the Middle Ages.
↑Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Q. 1, Art. 1, Reply 2, retrieved 3 September 2016, For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself.
↑Grant, Edward (2007), A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.303–305, ISBN9781139461092
↑Grant, Edward (2007), A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.303, 312–313, ISBN9781139461092
