Why bother? Mostly for efficiently organizing bookshelves and folders. To be clear, I don’t understand this sort of thing to hold any deep or critical significance: for me, it’s strictly the sort of thing we refer to in order to avoid organizational confusion. By my reckoning a fairly trivial all things considered so arguing about these distinctions is always needless and silly.
Let’s begin by looking beyond the umbrella concept of “philosophy” and consider the substance of its constituent parts. This collection of topics ordinarily includes but isn’t limited to: aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. Does it always make the best sort of sense to break it down this way? My guess: probably not, but these categories work fine within limits such as sorting out books or developing a familiarity with the way academics have traditionally treated the relevant subject matter.
A more nuanced alternative: sort by thinker or according to more specific historical recognized movements. IE: Platonism, Stoicism, Existentialism, Positivism, etc. How about topics like history, language, logic, politics, and other academic fields? Arguably anything has the potential for being philosophically interesting which is why it’s common to find philosophy and/of/thru topics such as philosophy of religion.
Using the flora or tree analogy, philosophy presumably stems from roots ground in the most commonplace of human activities like criticism, investigation, and problem-solving. Following this approach, it’s reasonable to suggest the structure of a banyan in that philosophies have historically emerged through growing over the top of or as a part of other traditions and different branches can potentially develop distinct sets of roots.
Thus organizing content using typically associated movements seems to work well. If that’s unclear for some reason, resources can still be arranged through the typical academic categories or according to whatever general themes are motivating the reader to engage the material in the first place.
A Name And A Place 