Karl Jaspers in the introduction of his three volume work about The Greatest Philosophers presented some arguments about their grouping which he listed there:
Volume I
The Paradigmatic Individuals: Socrates. Buddha. Confucius. Jesus.
The Seminal Founders of Philosophical Thought: Plato. Augustine. Kant.
Metaphysicians coming from the origin: Anaximander. Heraclitus. Parmenides.–Plotinus.–Anselm. (Cusanus.)–Spinoza.–Laotse. Nagarjuna.
Volume II The Projective Metaphysicians
Piety Toward the World: Xenophanes. Empedocles. Democritus. Posidonius. Bruno.
Gnostic truth-dreamers: Origen. Böhme. Schelling.
Constructive heads: Hobbes. Leibniz. Fichte.
The Unsettlers
:
Probing Negators: Abelard. Descartes. Hume.
The Great Awakeners: Pascal. Lessing. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche.
The Edifices of the Creative Orderers: Aristotle. Aquinas. Hegel.
Volume III
Philosophers
1. in poetry
: the Greek tragedians. Dante. Shakespeare. Goethe. Hölderlin. Dostoyevsky.
2. in research
:
Natural sciences: Kepler. Galilei. Darwin. von Baer. Einstein.
Historians: Ranke. Burckhardt. Max Weber.
3. in political thought
: Machiavelli. More. Locke. Montesquieu. Burke. Tocqueville.
in political criticism as foundation of an uncritical utopia
: Rousseau. Marx.
4. in education and literary criticism
:
Humanists: Cicero. Erasmus. Voltaire.
Education coming from its origin: Shaftesbury. Vico. Hamann.
German idea of humanism: Herder. Schiller. Humboldt.
Critics: Bacon. Bayle. Schopenhauer. Heine.
5. in wisdom of life
Transcendent shelteredness: Epictetus. Boethius.
Wisdom writers: Seneca. Chuang-Tse.
Calm without transcendence: Epicurus. Lucretius.
Skeptical independence: Montaigne.
6. in practice
Statesmen: Achenaton. Asoka. Marcus Aurelius. Frederic
the Great.Monks: St. Francis of Assisi.
Professionals: Hippocrates. Paracelsus.
7. in theology: Me-ti. Mencius.–St. Paul. Tertullian.–Malebranche. Berkeley.
8. in the teaching of philosophy: Proclus. Scotus Eriugena. Wolff. Erdmann.
Of course this is mostly a curiosity; no apparent logic but nevertheless 3 tiers and an idiosyncratic selection. In a similar vein Emmanuel Mounier for his Introduction aux Existentialismes produced a genetic tree with a no less curious selection of names (see here p.10). Anyway as philosophical examples such classifications are something really different from the taxonomies produced by various administrative offices.