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Well I'm not sure what you mean by "schools of thought". Religion? Philosophy? Social thought?
Politics? But let's take philosophy. Roughly speaking, in the West, the tradition, really from Socrates
on (with some problems in the Middle Ages) has been to question pretty much everything. Socrates
sacrificed his life to start that tradition, and it has more-or-less stuck. That is, the Western traditions of
philosophy, leading to the scientific revolution, have fairly explicitly included the idea that one must
not take any explanation, nor it's assumptions, for granted. Overthrowing schools of thought,
replacing them with syntheses, with deeper analyses, or with simply radically different schools is,
overtly at least, encouraged. One can claim that this is actually discouraged in the "academy", or that
this is not done effectively, and so forth... but that is one of philosophy's basic tenets in the West,
however successfully it is followed.
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This, in the main, is not true in traditional Eastern thought. That latter is for the most part religiously
motivated, in the following sense. While various schools of "philosophy" may elaborate greatly on
some tradition, questioning the bases of that tradition is almost always forbidden. Thus one may work
within a particular school of Buddhism, try to understand and elaborate on it, but to attempt to go to its
roots with the idea of altering, improving, destroying, or in any way radically changing them is just not
(traditionally) done. There is almost always a "dogma", a set of underlying assumptions, which
practitioners of a particular school mustfollow, or they are cast out, apostate, and have to operate, if
they can, as such. And that is why I put "philosophy" in quotes above. Since I follow the Western
tradition, and indeed believe it is better, in that sense at least, I do not consider traditions which
discourage that type of ultimate questioning as philosophy, but as dogmas, usually religious.
Inasmuch as that is changing, and allowing that kind of questioning, as it is in many places, it is
indeed philosophy. Now if you want the difference therebetween Eastern and Western thinking, I
would be much harder put to characterize it, except to say that much of Eastern philosophy is heavily
influenced by the religious roots it now questions. Thus, in Japan, for example, phenomenology is
extremely popular, because of its natural fit with Zen practices and the Japanese meditative
traditions. Inasmuch as it may question those traditions, it is philosophy. Inasmuch as it is adapted
only to further those traditions, it is not, in my opinion, philosophy.
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