Geisteswissenschaft (German pronunciation:[ˈɡaɪstəsˌvɪsənʃaft];plural:Geisteswissenschaften[ˈɡaɪstəsˌvɪsənʃaftən]; "science of mind";lit. "spirit science") is a set ofhuman sciences such asphilosophy,history,philology,musicology,linguistics,theater studies,literary studies,media studies,religious studies and sometimes evenjurisprudence, that are traditional in Germanuniversities. Most of its subject matter would come underHumanities in the typical English-speakinguniversity.
The concept ofGeist dates back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryGerman idealism, in particular toHerder's andHegel's concept of aVolksgeist, the alleged common "spirit", or rather, mind, of a people. To understand the termGeisteswissenschaften, one should bear in mind that the continentalfaculty of philosophy inherited the medievalfaculty 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 termGeisteswissenschaften first was used as translation ofJohn Stuart Mill’s term “moral sciences”. The historian, philosopher and sociologistWilhelm Dilthey popularised the term, arguing thatpsychology and the emerging field ofsociology – like thephilological and historical disciplines – should be considered asGeisteswissenschaft rather than asNaturwissenschaft (natural science), and that theirmethodology should reflect this classification. His arguments were very influential in the theories of the prominent German sociologistMax Weber, though Weber preferred the termKulturwissenschaft, which has been promoted by hisneo-Kantian colleagues (Wilhelm Windelband andHeinrich Rickert).
Since the times of Dilthey it became common to speak of theNaturwissenschaften on the one hand and theGeisteswissenschaften on the other – not particularly considering the status of mathematics and of philosophy itself. After the separation of the natural sciences and mathematics into a particular faculty (in some universities not until the 1950s), theGeisteswissenschaften were left alone in the philosophical faculty and even philosophy often was subsumed under the termGeisteswissenschaften. Meanwhile, many of the German universities have split up these faculties in smaller departments, so that the old common interests and the old borders are less visible.
The term is now used irregularly. In administrative contexts it is used broadly to discuss how to organise the academic institutions and describe the culture of academic discussions, so that the faculties of Theology and Law are added to the Geisteswissenschaften. In some contexts of science policy theGeisteswissenschaften are described as non-empirical sciences, drawing them near philosophy and excluding the social sciences from their area.[1]
In the context of methodology on the contrary it has been emphasised, thatGeisteswissenschaften such ashistory and thephilological disciplines, relying on empirical data (documents, books and utterances), along withpsychology and thesocial sciences, have a commonempirical character, which is essentially based on comprehension (Verstehen) or understanding of expressions of meaning.[2]
Other authors, likeRudolf Steiner, used the termGeisteswissenschaft in a historically quite distinct sense to refer to a proposed "Science of Spirit".
FromKulturgeschichte Frankreichs, Suchanek-Fröhlich, p. 633:[3]
Man hat Taine vorgeworfen, dass er, dessen Hauptziel die Einführung naturwissenschaftlicher Methoden in die Geisteswissenschaften war, selbst nicht induktiv, sondern deduktiv vorging.
Translation:
Some reproachTaine in that he himself, whose goal was the introduction of the methods of natural science into theGeisteswissenschaften, proceeded from methods which were not inductive but rather deductive.
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