Geisteswissenschaften German pronunciation: , "sciences of mind", lit. "spirit science" is a manner of human sciences such(a) as philosophy, history, philology, musicology, linguistics, theater studies, literary studies, media studies, together with sometimes even theology and jurisprudence, that are traditional in German universities. almost of its identified matter would come under Humanities in the typical English-speaking university.
The concept of Geist dates back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German idealism, in specific 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 alive 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 neokantian colleagues Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert.