A good piece of analysis on the emergence of European/Western identity:“The process by which people in the West came to define what made their own civilization distinctive among the civilizations of the world entailed drawing a series of sharp contrasts between what they noww began to see as Western and what they began to see as non-Western. These contrasts delienated those characteristics and virtues which Europeans were coming to see as unique to Western civilization, especially in its modern form, and which they thought accounted for its increasing power, wealth and knowledge. Conversely, it was other societies’ lack of these characteristics, these core values and traits, that made them weak and backward and that thus both facilitated and justified Western domination. In the course of defining who they were not and who their ‘others’ were, Europeans simultaneously defined and consolidated their own identity.”Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East
Philosophy was long regarded as the sole method of thought that would explain phenomena, be it imaginary, concrete, celestial, or terrestrial. Aristotle was a biologist, if we look at his work from today's perspective. He was mainly interested in the species that scattered all over the places. His concern was to collect as many different animals and plants as possible, so that he would have been able to talk about them with greater certainty. However, he was also a strong advocate of categorization and in order to categorize what he had collected, he needed to contemplate on what to put in this or that category or on what makes two things different. This contemplation made him a philosopher, as we understand it today.