As far as I'm concerned, philosophy basically ran out of gas in about 1700, leaving western society to coast until about 1875 and then things started to degrade into today's malaise. Although today a philosophy teacher can barely defend his or her own claim to any specific subject matter, for most of philosophy's history there have been treatments of the sort of questions people traditionally have asked philosophy to help answer - What is the world? Why am I here? What matters? What will become of us? What is right, good, beautifal? What is knowledge and what is error?

An unusually clear single-author treatment of these questions would be the recently reprinted A History Of Philosophy by Wilhelm Windelband, who in the 1890's was head of the philosophy department at the University of Salzburg, Austria (a part of the German Empire at the time, and so much a part that its name contemporary with Windelband was the Kaiser Wilhelm University of Salzburg). Briefly, the value in this history is that it delivers what I consider to be a properly commendational treatment of Aristotle's significance not only to the development of Greek philosophy, but with respect to Aristotle's double re-emergence first in the Thomism of the Middle Ages, then with the more oblique Renaissance influences in later philosophers and men of letters. That a German philosopher would deliver such a positive treatment of Aristotelianism is surprising, since one would expect an academic in that country and working in the midst of post-Hegelian trends to depricate antiquity in favor of "The German Philosophy", as Europeans call it (referring to such as the progression of Wolff/Kant/Fichte//Schelling/Schiller/Schliermacher/Hegel and so on).

This edition (from Lightning Source, Inc. Books, one volume in hardback; about $55) is one of the few printings out since 1895, although my edition (second ed. of the James Tufts translation) is in two volumes, trade paperback from 1958. The current hardback repeats this second Tufts version of 1901, complete with the rather antique title treatments of having periods placed after section headings. It might be considered a shortcoming for a history to have no treatment of the twentieth century, but for my own purposes I consider any academic philosophy produced after 1900 to be akin to case law to the law student: something to be studied in order to prepare for future argument, not something to be studied for any inherent value or usefulness whatever. For coverage through Sartre, I'd suggest the W.T. Jones multivolume history, the Thelma Lavine one-volume treatment "From Socrates To Sartre", and for existentialism alone Willam Barrett's "Irrational Man", the book credited with introducing North America to that movement in the late '50's.

Windelband in addition to positively treating Aristotle and the Renaissance, uses literary analogies and examples to make points in a way that philosophers may have done often, but today seem rarely capable of doing. Although his examples are often with reference to German sources unusual to me, such names as Goethe can be considered universally relevant. It may be a bit of work for an English speaker to wade through the thickets of subordinate clauses common to translations of German, but the payoff comes in the experience of a clear and broad perspective over two millenia of searches, questions and answers.

(Below: contents page of 1958 edition)
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Contents.

INTRODUCTION.

1. Name and Conception of Philosophy
2. The History of Philosophy
3. Division of Philosophy and of its History

PART I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GREEKS.

Introduction

Chapter I. The Cosmological Period
4. Conceptions of Being
5. Conceptions of the Cosmic Processes or Becoming
6. Conceptions of Cognition

Chapter II. The Anthropological Period
7. The Problem of Morality
8. The Problem of Science

Chapter III. The Systematic Period
9. Metaphysics grounded anew by Epistemology and Ethics
10. The System of Materialism
11. The System of Idealism
12. Aristotelian Logic
13. The System of Development

PART II. THE HELLENISTIC-ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.

Introduction

Chapter I. The Ethical Period
14. The Ideal of the Wise Man
15. Mechanism and Teleology
16. The Freedom of the Will and the Perfection of the Universe
17. The Criteria of Truth

Chapter II. The Religious Period
18. Authority and Revelation
19. Spirit and Matter
20. God and the World
21. The Problem of the World's History

PART III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

Introduction

Chapter I. First Period
22. The Metaphysics of Inner Experience
23. The Controversy over Universals
24. The Dualism of Body and Soul

Chapter II. Second Period
25. The Realm of Nature and the Realm of Grace
26. The Primacy of the Will or of the Intellect
27. The Problem of Individuality

PART IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE.

Introduction

Chapter I. The Humanistic Period
28. The Struggle between the Traditions
29. Macrocasm and Microcasm

Chapter II. The Natural Science Period
30. The Problem of Method
31. Substance and Causality
32. Natural Right

PART V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT.

Introduction

Chapter I. Theoretical Questions
33. Innate Ideas
34. Knowledge of the External World
35. Natural Religion

Chapter II. Practical Questions
36. The Principals of Morals
37. The Problem of Civilisation

PART VI. THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHY.

Introduction

Chapter I. Kant's Critique of the Reason
38. The Object of Knowledge
39. The Categorical Imperative
40. Natural Purposiveness

Chapter II. The Development of Idealism
41. The Thing-in-itself
42. The System of Reason
43. The Metaphysics of the Irrational

PART VII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Introduction

44. The Controversy over the Soul
45. Nature and History
46. The Problem of Values

Appendix

Index

(Hardcover; 726 pages)