Geisteswissenschaften, a term commonly used in German to denote disciplines referred to as "the humanities" in English, emerged in the course of a nineteenth-centry discussion about the proper designation for those disciplines whose topics and methodologies were different from those of the newly predominant natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) such as physics, biology, and chemistry. A compound word, its second component—"the word Wissenschaften" or "sciences"—indicates that these disciplines are indeed legitimate sciences, but sciences of a different kind than the natural sciences. The assumption underlying the discussion out of which the term emerged is that there are valid scientific methods for studying topics such as literature, art, and history, but that the objects of these disciplines and their appropriate methods were significantly different from the objects and quantitative methods appropriate of modern natural science. Originally conceived as one side of a binary opposition between the realms of "nature...