  Windelband pointed out that the customary distinction of the empirical sciences into natural sciences and Geisteswissenschaften (that is, literally spiritual or mental sciences and used in German to indicate the humanities and the social sciences) is deeply misleading (Windelband 1980, 173). This is because it seems to suggest that these two groups of sciences differ primarily with respect to their subject matter, that is, in the first case ‘nature’ and in the second case ‘mind’. However, there are at least two problems with this classification: (1) a significant number of disciplines commonly considered Geisteswissenschaften have little or nothing to do with the study of the human mind. Take, for instance, art history, political economics or archeology. None of these disciplines seems to have mental processes and states as their subject matter. (2) According to this classification psychology should be considered a Geisteswissenschaft and presumably even the most fundamental of all Geisteswissenschaften in that it studies the human mind in the most direct and rigorous fashion. Indeed, in late nineteenth century Germany there was a widely spread expectation that progress in psychology should have led to significant reforms in all other humanistic fields of research. This expectation, however, clashes with the fact that psychology’s method is much more similar to that of physics, chemistry, and biology than with that of literary studies or musicology. Psychology, too, seeks to determine its subject matter in terms of general laws and works with the aid of mathematical models and experiments. Considering these anomalies Windelband’s proposal is to drop content-related distinctions altogether and rely exclusively on a methodological distinction between “nomothetic” and “idiographic” sciences (Windelband 1980, 175). One group of sciences works by way of positing general laws and understanding its objects as examples of such general laws (nomo-thetic). Another group of sciences aims at producing illuminating descriptions of irreducibly individual and unrepeatable occurrences (idiographic). Most importantly, “the same subjects can be the object of both a nomothetic and an idiographic investigation” (Windelband 1980, 175). From this purely methodological point of view, sciences like psychology, physics, chemistry, and biology all belong in the same group as nomothetic, whereas sciences like history, art history, and musicology are to be considered idiographic. This distinction is meant to reorganize the universe of knowledge and to avoid unhelpful encroachments of empirical psychology on the work of humanistic disciplines, whose theoretical aims are fundamentally alien to nomothetic inquiry.