Geisteswissenschaft

As you say, the German word Wissenschaft is an umbrella term that covers almost all systematic knowledge, almost every discipline now represented in a modern university.

And the split between the natural sciences, the Naturwissenschaften, and the equivalent, though not the exact analogy of the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften, really takes place only in the latter part of the 19th century, and it's in reaction to the natural sciences, what we now call the natural sciences, beginning to band together and assuming ever more importance and receiving ever more funding, not only from universities, but also from industry and from government.

And it's in the latter part, in the 1880s, that people like Dilthey and Windelband decide they need to have an umbrella term for the equivalent for what we call the humanities, namely the Geisteswissenschaften.

So there's a kind of minuet going on between these fields which leads to the evolution of our current terminology.

And we might ask ourselves, not in this conversation, but more generally, whether or not these three great continents, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities of knowledge, whether they haven't perhaps served their purpose and are now outdated.

This is the great problem.

And he held the chair in philosophy after Hegel at the University of Berlin in the late 19th century and wrote beautifully on the nature of the humanities, which were called in his day in German the Geisteswissenschaften, so sciences of the spirit.

It's a human spirit.

German is a fascinating language.