Philosophy

Sculpture is divided into modeling and carving, one additive, one subtractive. They lead to very different ways of thinking. Does philosophy have anything to say about creating meaning by tasking something away (carving) as opposed to continual increase (modeling)? It seems as if almost all normal academic disciplines are now additive.

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What a nice question! You're right that we typically think of academic disciplines as adding knowledge rather than taking anything away. The operative phrase always seems to be "creating new knowledge." However, it doesn't go without saying that this is the only valuable thing an academic discipline can do, and Philosophy is sometimes "subtractive", to use your term. The reason is that part of the role of Philosophy is to relieve people of certain kinds of perplexity, and sometimes a good way to do this is not to answer a question that is puzzling them, but rather to show that the question is itself dubious in some way. So suppose for instance someone is trying to find the meaning of life. Philosophers will often be inclined *not* to try to answer the question directly, but rather to get the person to think harder about what sort of answer could possibly satisfy them. Again, the phrase 'the meaning of life' presupposes that there is exactly one thing that is life's meaning, whereas for all we know there might be none, or instead there might be eleven! Sometimes this resistance to taking questions at face value can prod people to reconsider those questions, and after such reconsideration the questioner might begin to wonder whether she has a real question at all.

The strategy I've just given an example of is a sort of intellectual therapy: the "patients" are people with various kinds of perplexity, and sometimes the philosopher can help them by getting them to overcome that perplexity, but without giving them any answers. Such overcoming can be subtractive.

Of course, another form of subtraction can come in the form of a philosopher debunking various kinds of ill-supported theories and doctrines, either in philosophy or other fields. However, the therapeutic style of subtraction might be less well known in spite of being at least as important.

Mitch Green

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