Geisteswissenschaften

Geisteswissenschaft (; plural: Geisteswissenschaften ; "science of mind"; "spirit science") is a set of human sciences such as philosophy, history, philology, musicology, linguistics, theater studies, literary studies, media studies, religious studies and sometimes even jurisprudence, that are traditional in German universities. Most of its subject matter would come under Humanities in the typical English-speaking university.

==History== The concept of Geist dates back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German idealism, in particular to Herder's and Hegel's concept of a Volksgeist, the alleged common "spirit", or rather, mind, of a people. To understand the term Geisteswissenschaften, one should bear in mind that the continental faculty of philosophy inherited the medieval faculty of arts. Besides philosophy itself it encompassed the natural sciences with mathematics as well as the philological and historical disciplines and later on psychology and the social sciences. The term Geisteswissenschaften first was used as translation of John Stuart Mill's term "moral sciences". The historian, philosopher and sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey popularised the term, arguing that psychology and the emerging field of sociology – like the philological and historical disciplines – should be considered as Geisteswissenschaft rather than as Naturwissenschaft (natural science), and that their methodology should reflect this classification. His arguments were very influential in the theories of the prominent German sociologist Max Weber, though Weber preferred the term Kulturwissenschaft, which has been promoted by his neo-Kantian colleagues (Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert).