ABSTRACT
The history of the humanities, or Geisteswissenschaften, lags far behind the historiography of the exact or natural sciences. Therefore, one may fruitfully look for models or examples in the history of the natural sciences in order to avoid reinventing the wheel, or running into difficulties that have already been encountered elsewhere, and perhaps even solved. There are also more principled reasons, however, for thematizing the rise of a strict disciplinary opposition between the humanities and the natural sciences, an opposition which is more recent and less stable than one might think. A strict distinction between them (e.g. as concerned with distinct objects of study or employing different methods of research) was unknown to Aristotle and to medieval scholars, and only started being made, amidst fierce discussion and contestation, in the seventeenth century; it did not stabilize until around 1800.
