Admittedly, I created my previous discussion too hastily and it ended up without a clear thesis and detouring. My bad, let's try this again. Skip to the bottom parts to see the general thesis.

When we think about "philosophy", we think about people like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, James, Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, the list goes on, but the vast majority are white men from Europe, and a few from North America. A lot of these figures can also be categorized into separate "schools" or "traditions": there's the Ancients, Scholastics, Rationalists, Empiricists, (Post-)Kantians, Hegelians, phenomenologists (shout out!), logical positivists, pragmatists, structuralists, post-structuralists, post-modernists, post-post-modernists ( :-O ), etc. Many of these are thrown somewhere in analytic or continental philosophy. And there are also very specific traditions, such as the British intuitionist moral philosophers (Sidgwick, Moore, Ross, Ewing, etc), the German pessimistic Weltschmerz philosophers (Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Mainlander, etc).

That's a mouthful. And it's fun and interesting to read about the "story" of western philosophy, how it all kind of hangs together and is inter-connected, and can make people like myself want to be a "part" of this story, and contribute to the overall dynamic.

There are a few issues I'm somewhat concerned about, though. Not that I think they necessarily actually are issues - more like I'm just seeking clarification:

If philosophical questions "universal", then why do we so often choose to only study the philosophy that comes out from the West, specifically Europe and North America? One answer would be that we just don't have a good reason (and we ought to change that). Clearly this must be true in some cases.

Another answer would be that other cultures just don't offer what Western philosophy does - in this case, we decide to study Western philosophy because we think it is in some way better than what other cultures can offer. We can see this especially when we talk about, say, German Idealism: literally its core thinkers came from the German heartland. Or British intuitionist moral philosophy: all of the biggies lived in Great Britain. Or French feminism. Or American pragmatism. Or Italian aesthetics. Continental philosophy owes its name to its emphasis on a series of thinkers from the European continent. In all these cases, some group of people from a specific region on Earth are held to a higher standard than alternatives (if there are any).

This results in the inevitable question: why is it these people? What made Germany such a great place for post-Kantian philosophy? What made Great Britain such a central hub for modern moral philosophy? Why did America have all the pragmatists? What were all the other cultures doing?

I'm not trying to push some racist interpretation here. If you believe some tradition in philosophy, even if it's just Western philosophy in general, "has it right", why was it this tradition? The only explanation I can think of is: nobody else was doing it. So then this either ends up with an exceptionalist view on some group of people, or it's entirely accidental that these people were on the right track. Personally I'm favoring the accidentalist view here. Environmental factors play a huge role in the development of a society, as do contingent political events and technological limitations.

Now, I'm beginning to ramble and I assume some of you are starting to roll your eyes so here's my general thesis: unless we are talking about history, we should preferably stop using terms like "Western philosophy", "German idealism", "British analytic philosophy", "American pragmatism", "continental philosophy" and the like, because they inevitably harbor ethnocentrism, as well as narrow-minded thinking in general. Philosophy is supposed to study truth, and using these regional and ethnic terms actually taints what it's supposed to be studying: truth now becomes German truth, or British truth. The same could be said about philosophical giant's names: the truth becomes "Nietzschean", or "Heideggerian", or whatever. It's not just "truth". The ideas and concepts may be given priority but the presence of their authors looms in the background and is only made worse when we insist on associating them with these authors or their regional locations.

Really, I think it comes whether or not it's justifiable, or recommended, that we use traditions the way we do in philosophy, and how this reflects our conception of philosophy and how it should be done. It's hard to study philosophy, let alone do philosophy, without feeling compelled from around and within to associate oneself with some tradition, or start one yourself. These names for the truth are just clothes, the truth as it is naked, by itself, is nameless.