Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently defined as any fields of study outside of natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences (like mathematics) and applied sciences (or professional training). They use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences; yet, unlike the sciences, there is no general history of humanities as a distinct discipline in its own right.

The humanities include the studies of foreign languages, history, philosophy, language arts (literature, writing, oratory, rhetoric, poetry, etc.), performing arts (theater, music, dance, etc.), and visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, filmmaking, etc.); culinary art or cookery is interdisciplinary and may be considered both a humanity and a science. Some definitions of the humanities include law and religion, but these are not universally accepted. Although anthropology, archaeology, geography, linguistics, logic, and sociology share some similarities with the humanities, these are widely considered sciences; similarly economics, finance, and political science are not typically considered humanities.