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This is a comprehensive look at the history of philosophy up until the late 19th century. From the intro:
“Philosophy is reflection, the thinking consideration of things. This definition exhausts not the idea of philosophy, however. Man thinks in his practical activities as well, where he calculates the means to the attainment of ends and all the other sciences—those even which belong not to philosophy in the stricter sense—are of the nature of thought. By what, then, does philosophy distinguish itself from these sciences? By what does it distinguish itself, for example, from the science of astronomy, or from that of medicine, or of jurisprudence? Not, certainly, by the difference of its matter. Its matter is quite the same as that of the various empirical sciences. Plan and order of the universe, structure and function of the human body, property, law, politics,—all these belong to philosophy quite as much as to their respective special sciences. What is given in experience —actual fact—that, their material, is the material of philosophy also. It is not, then, by its matter that philosophy distinguishes itself from the empirical sciences, but by its form, by its method,—so to speak by its mode of knowing. The various empirical sciences take their matter directly from experience; they find it ready to hand and as they find it, they accept it. Philosophy, on the contrary, accepts not what is given in experience as it is given, but follows it up into its ultimate grounds, regarding each particular fact only in relation to a final principle, and as a determinate link in the system of knowledge. But just so it strips from such particular fact—which to our senses seems but a something given this its character of independency, individualness and contingency. In the sea of empirical particulars, in the confused infinitude of the contingent, it establishes the universal, the necessary, the all-pervading law. In short, philosophy considers the entire empirical finite in the form of an intelligently articulated system.â€
