The FT Magazine has published a version of an article I wrote on ancient philosophy and philosophy today. A longer version follows and in the next few days I'll post more of the interviews I conducted in the course of researching the piece with philosophers from Alain de Botton to Martha Nussbaum.

A Dutch philosopher, Eric Hoekstra, has just spent seven days living in a wooden barrel. For the first week of April - the month of philosophy in the Netherlands - he occupied an upturned tub at Leeuwarden University. It being the 21st century, his unconventional, temporary home was equipped with high bandwidth communications, though he says that his aesthetic love of wood helped more as he sat it out.

He was following the example of the ancient Greek, Diogenes, the founder of the Cynic school of philosophy. The label comes from the Greek for dog, though it might have made more sense to call them after the word for mouse, for Diogenes said that it was after watching such a rodent scurrying about - not bothered by the dark, discomfort or dreary food - that he realised the key to the happy life: self-sufficient simplicity. From that moment on he understood the goal of his philosophy.

Cynic was meant as an insult. Plato attacked Diogenes for being ‘Socrates gone mad.’ Socrates did not seek to live life at the extremes, Plato argued; he did not desire self-sufficiency so much as self-knowledge. Diogenes countered by charging Plato’s lectures as a waste of time. To make his point, he would show up during intricate disputations at the Academy, Plato’s school, waving a plucked chicken - in mockery of Plato’s definition of man as a ‘featherless biped’.

This is just a taster of the myths and anecdotes that accrued around the ancient Greek philosophers. Whatever their veracity, the fact that there are stories stands as a reminder of just how seriously at least some 4th century BCE Athenians took their philosophy and its central question of how we should live.

They lived in the shadow of Socrates. As Cicero later commented, it was he that ‘brought down philosophy from the heavens to the earth’ - meaning that he thought philosophers would do well to cease their more esoteric speculations and concentrate on the practical concerns of life. Long before he was sentenced to death in 399 BCE, he had become concerned for his city-state. Alongside its intellectual life, he worried that Athenians were becoming too confident in their rapidly advancing technology - technology that amazes us to this day in the shape of the Parthenon. He argued that it was all worthless unless they could lead good lives. It was this conviction that sparked his philosophical revolution.

Socrates developed a striking and new definition of philosophy: it is that way of life which makes the philosopher into a good human being. ‘The integrity of your personal life, the way you express yourself was what counted,’ explains Professor John Cottingham, author of On the Meaning of Life. ‘Philosophy was a struggle to make sense of life that was all consuming.’ There could hardly be a greater task. Today, the Socratic way of life would appear to have at least as much to do with psychoanalysis as philosophy; with its stress on the primacy of praxis, it can be fruitfully compared to a monastic vocation.

Diogenes too believed that it is not what you say but what you do that counts. And Plato, on this point at least, would have agreed. For all his hifalutin ideas, it is often forgotten that for many years Plato seems to have refused to write anything. He feared that people might think that to read books was to do philosophy. He believed real knowledge was not like water that can be poured from one vessel to another; it must emerge from within. When he was finally persuaded to put quill to scroll, in order to reach a wider audience, he invented the dialogue. His hope was that philosophical dramas would show people engaged in forms of life. This would force his readers to answer back, that is to think and be changed for themselves too.

Dr Hoekstra did not engaged in any of Diogenes’ more extreme protests. ‘Although no Cynic, I have a personal preference for the oldest Greek philosophy and to simpler ways of living,’ he explains. But just thinking of a present-day philosopher sitting in a barrel prompts an immediate observation: could modern academic philosophy be more distant from its ancient classical origins? It is not just that the salty question of how we should live seems to have given way to the dry matter of what we think. Today, many so-called analytic philosophers would say that the separation of their discipline from personal biography is one of its greatest strengths.

‘I think that philosophy consists mostly of criticism,’ says Jerry Fodor of Rutgers University. This view of philosophy is what he calls a ‘meta-activity’. Essentially, it consists of looking over the shoulders of other academics, typically those gathering empirical data, and trying to make sense of what they find. On a more personal level, he adds: ‘I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don’t imagine I’d ask someone whose credentials consist of a PhD in philosophy.’

Alternatively, Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, would speak for many of his peers when he says that philosophy today is at its best when it works with modern science. ‘Philosophy tends to deal with bigger, more abstract or more fundamental questions, especially ones that have not yet been clarified sufficiently to be susceptible to scientific investigation, but I don't make a sharp distinction,’ he explains.

However, not all contemporary anglophone philosophers think of their discipline in this way. In fact, there are a few who react strongly against it. Science matters, of course. But these so-called continental philosophers look too to French and German writers such as Heidegger and Derrida. These writers are a difficult read. And this is the source of a bitter division that ran right through 20th century philosophy. To analytic philosophers, continental philosophy is willfully and irresponsibly obscure. It spurns the clarity of scientific knowledge to the extent that, to some, it has forfeited the right to be called philosophy at all.

Simon Glendinning has just published a book on the divide, The Idea of Continental Philosophy. He is at pains to stress that although the gulf might seem fundamental to those raised in the anglophone world, it actually only relatively recently took hold, after the Second World War. Further, Dr Glendinning does not deny that reading Heidegger and Derrida is hard. This, though, is for a very good reason. ‘When I was getting into philosophy I kept returning to difficult books,’ he explains. ‘All the philosophers I liked to read had this opacity. But it is not obscurantism. It is the character of a demanding read that it does not leave you where you were when you started.’ In other words, it is a style of writing that, like Plato’s, aims to draw the reader in. It is not content to seek an objective answer to a question, such as say, what is to be a person, without highlighting that the individual doing the asking is a person too. To put it another way, true knowledge has a subjective as well as an objective dimension. Iris Murdoch called it changing someone’s ‘vision of life’.

Heidegger has been important to another philosopher, Havi Carel, for even more strikingly personal reasons. She suffers from LAM disease, a rare, incurable lung condition. When she was first diagnosed, she had a feeling of time folding in on her, coupled to powerful waves of resentment that her life would be short. However, it was recalling the work of Heidegger, along with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, that she found new strength. ‘Philosophy gave me the capacity to reflect not just emotionally but rationally on my disease,’ she says. It enabled her to take a broader perspective on the feelings of anger and envy that rose up inside her, lessening their destructiveness. In particular, Heidegger seeks to grapple with the reality of death in life: he defined human existence as ‘being towards death’. And Epicurus taught his followers not to be afraid of death, since death is non-existence, that is, absolutely nothing.

Epicurus also pursued things that produce happiness, like friendship and small pleasures. ‘The good news is that you can make choices to focus your life on such things,’ Dr Carel continues. ‘It is not only me who has realised that stepping off the consumer treadmill is not such a big loss.’

That philosophy spoke powerfully to Dr Carel is no surprise to Simon Critchley, currently Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He is writing a book on the ways philosophers have died - as they have in the most extraordinary ways. There is the story about Heraclitus expiring in cow dung. Pythagoras was apparently killed by beans, indirectly. But there is a serious side to Professor Critchley’s book too. For many philosophers philosophy was a deliberately morbid pursuit, in the sense that they believed it is only when you know how to die, with all its uncertainties, that you know how to live. Again following Socrates, the personal was key.

This was not only an ancient concern. The death of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume was throughly documented by his friend, the economist Adam Smith, because the supreme proof of Hume’s arguments against religious belief was not their cogency but that he could be seen to die without fear. Smith contrived to describe Hume’s death in the same way that Plato portrayed Socrates’ last hours. Today, it is common to celebrate Hume as a sceptic of religion. To his friends, it was more important that he was akin to a pagan saint.

The link between philosophy and biography continued after Hume. Immanuel Kant, who died a few years later, led an uneventful life; and yet although his Critiques are exacting reads, they had practical intent: he wanted to know how to live well and where to find meaning. A generation later, came the high point of modern philosophical biography: John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography is a philosophical classic in its own right. The link received new energy in the writings of Bertrand Russell, and fascination with the personality of his extraordinary student Ludwig Wittgenstein. But, then, it weakened. Philosophers became increasingly enamoured with an objectivity that seemed compromised by the vicissitudes of life. The word continental became a pejorative term. For most philosophers entering anglophone universities during the 50s, 60s and 70s, the disconnection seemed obvious, right and permanent. Except that now, things are shifting again. Two broad observations suggest that some analytic philosophers are attempting to re-forge connections between their discipline and its application. Moreover, being associated with continental philosophy may no longer be the career-killer it once was.

The first observation is negative, and stems from a certain discontent with the path analytic philosophy has followed. ‘Philosophy has become far too professionalised,’ says Sir Anthony Kenny, who recently published a book entitled What I Believe. His remark, reflecting a lifetime in the subject, is significant because he is arguably Britain’s most distinguished living philosopher. What he laments is the fact that much of the work done in philosophy departments today is highly technical: it is inaccessible to other philosophers, let alone the public at large. In some subjects, such as physics, such complexity is unavoidable since the ‘raw material’ of the subject, like mathematics, takes years to master. ‘But philosophers don’t have information that is unavailable to others,’ Professor Kenny continues. ‘In philosophy the best of it should be available to all. It is for this reason that I admire Bertrand Russell, even if I don’t always agree with him, because of the way he could write serious philosophy that was readable by a wide public.’ A related issue is what might be called the industrialisation of philosophy. Young philosophers have to publish and establish themselves in a niche if they are to find a job. ‘Philosophers have become commodities,’ says Graham Priest of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Though just in stating it so bluntly, Professor Priest implies that some at least are unhappy with the game of impressing peers for its own sake.

A.C. Grayling, probably Britain’s most prominent philosopher today, calls any refusal to engage - as if it were a kind of virtue - a dereliction of duty. It is not just that philosophy has valuable resources from which others can benefit. He believes that philosophy itself risks becoming impoverished when it ceases to care about its application. ‘In the anglophone world, academics and intellectuals are not coterminous,’ Professor Grayling drolly observes. Academics might be scholarly and clever, but that is different from having understanding. And that again is different from being wise - which after all is the aspiration implied by the word ‘philosophy’.

Julian Baggini, whose latest book Welcome to Everytown maps the ‘folk philosophy’ of the English mind, has another take on the situation. He believes that there is a kind of snobbery which poisons many philosophers’ attempts to engage in wider debates. They can be dismissive, quick to spot contradictions, and impatient with the fact that real life can’t wait for all its rational wrinkles to be ironed out. ‘The problem is that to do so you have to think at a level of generality that most academic philosophers are not comfortable with,’ Dr Baggini says.

There are, of course, exceptions. In the US, Martha Nussbaum is an example of someone with a fiercely analytical mind who produces work that is nothing if not applied. She has provided the rationale for the UNDP’s Human Development Reports and has written extensively on matters like grief and disgust. ‘In general, I think that getting clear about the reasons for one’s beliefs matters in human life, and that it is a good thing for us all to do,’ she explains. As Chair of the Committee on Public Philosophy in the American Philosophical Association she actually believes that there are dozens, even hundreds, of philosophers who are addressing wider topics. The problem she believes is not philosophy’s: it is the media. ‘Entities such as the New York Times Book Review and other major newspapers are becoming less and less interested in the work of philosophers,’ she says, noting too that the reverse is true in continental Europe and countries like India.

However, this only points to another challenge to those who brave life outside of the ivory tower: professional derision. ‘As one who is publicly identified as a controversial and outspoken spokesperson, I know that this role of mine is disapproved of by some philosophers,’ says Daniel Dennett, well known for his advocacy of evolutionary theory. ‘It is frustrating to reflect that some of my best philosophical arguments are unheeded by some of the professional philosophers they are most addressed to because they appear in books that are deemed “popular”.’ Having said that Professor Dennett is happy to give as good as he gets. He has written professional papers on what he calls ‘chmess’, namely an expertise in artifactual topics that no one else would, or should, care about. It is ‘treacherously easy for graduate students to be lured into devoting their careers to them’, he writes.

His reference to popular philosophy raises the second indicator that anglophone philosophy is seeking to reconnect. For popular philosophy is a growth area in publishing. It is hard to supply precise figures, since many books with philosophical content fall into other categories, but in the UK at least the overall trend for the past 5 years is up. ‘There is something of a backlash against celebrity non-fiction at the moment,’ explains Giles Elliot, charts and media editor at The Bookseller. ‘The book industry is very interested in intellectual non-fiction.’

Popular philosophy books fall into roughly three categories. A handful are classics and whether read or not, sell for that reason. The second, largest group are introductions to the subject. They present thought experiments, potted histories, and unpacked concepts. In startling readers with intellectual pleasures, they do a good job for the subject. Then there is a third sort that attempts to engage readers at a different level again. In terms of style and content, they are more squarely concerned with the ancient Greeks’ questions about life. ‘My fundamental belief is that the range of legitimate philosophical questions is far greater than the academy holds,’ says the writer Alain de Botton - pointing to issues in everyday life like friendship, desire, death, and children. In this, he reflects a profound ambivalence towards philosophers. When he published The Consolations of Philosophy, the best-seller that associated him with philosophy, he reports that: ‘the academics became hysterical that I was an interloper on their hallowed ground.’ He prefers now to be called an essayist. ‘There’s a category all of its own, not derivative of academic philosophy, entirely independent of it, where writers tackle important subjects in a lucid, sometimes personal way,’ he continues. ‘The patron saint of this tradition is Michel de Montaigne.’

However, I think that any new divide is worth resisting. For one thing, philosophers, for all their faults, must be consulted when engaging with the tradition that reaches back to Socrates and his bickering disciples. If you don’t, you just make mistakes. And I also think that the best popular philosophy has something to teach academia. If analytic philosophers have mastered a scholastic rigour that can argue very precisely about the modern equivalents of angels dancing on a pinhead, then perhaps part of the contemporary sea-change could be to redirect at least some of these powers to a different kind of precision, exemplified by the novelist. They strive, vividly, to capture the subtleties of the human condition, the nuances of moral positions, and the paradoxes of existence. They know, as Plato did, that when it is life you are after, style counts. And I feel sure he would have his distant successors think about this question again. ‘For our discussion is about no ordinary matter, but on the right way to conduct our lives,’ he said.