Kyary, I’ve an additional piece about Rand and Schelling 1800 here.
I think it most interesting to explore affinities philosophers A and B have that are positions not widely shared by other philosophers. Even then, A and B’s reasons can be quite different and interesting. The case I’m still not finished with, but will probably finish in the first half of 2023, is both Dewey and Peikoff holding Kant and subsequent German Idealists as philosophers most to blame for making the culture in which the Nazis ascended to power and carried out their heinous deeds. This is a minority position; even Sidney Hook, who was Dewey’s bulldog (and Piekoff’s dissertation advisor) disputed Dewey on this idea. Right or wrong in the conclusion, the reasons for it from Dewey and from Peikoff, from Pragmatism and from Objectivism, are different. (I’ll also dispose the correctness of the conclusion by the end of this study.)
Always, anyway, precision of representation is everything. If we are too coarse-grained or use A and B’s shared words with double meaning not drawn out, we’d not be saying much.
I’ve noticed that it takes a lot of study and rehearsal of thinkers to be able to state the difference between them off the top of one’s head. Most of my non-professional philosophy friends cannot tell me the difference between Kant and Berkeley or between Kant and Descartes off the top of the head. (As I recall, your first language is not English; do you know phrases like “off the top of the head”?) And many Objectivist friends of mine have not read much of the classical philosophers (or Freud, . . .) themselves and know only Rand’s or Peikoff’s representations and criticisms of them. Those criticisms do not generally get to the really deep differences between Kant and Rand because some of their understanding of Kant goes off the rails and some of the pertinent Kant is never sufficiently grappled with and understood at all. (Do you read Kant, Fichte, and Schelling in German or English?)
I take the remarks of 2046 to heart for my own sort of writing. I listen carefully and at least kick myself when I’ve decided to sacrifice writing advice I’ve gotten from my philosophy professors and professional-philosopher friends for some special concern I have for a particular audience. One reason I’ve always (since I began to write papers in 1984) tried to cite specific places in writings of thinkers when I represent their thought is for me to be able to easily get back to the source of my claim about them when I need to refresh my learning years later. The other reason is to give readers, with a contrary view of a thinker, that cited text for imagining how I might be led to my representation of the thinker and for such a reader, in reply, to analyze the specific text differently or bring in other countervailing text of the thinker being represented.