Researching a piece on philosophy, ancient and modern, for the FT Magazine, I spoke to a number of big hitters. Here's something of my exchange with Daniel Dennett.

'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"'

Speaking with various academics, contemporary anglophone philosophy has been characterised in various ways - fragmented, overly professional, flourishing, revived by modern science. How would you characterise it?

I think there is truth in all these claims. The philosophers I pay attention to are all, in one way or another, paying close professional attention to other disciplines, ranging from physics and biology, psychology and neuroscience (and mathematics) to history and anthropology and economics. Then there are those who shun these interdisciplinary perspectives. The professionalization of these folks is, I think, somewhat illusory. That is, they become 'experts' on artifactual, hermetically sealed topic areas that no one else would, or should, care about. [I call this 'the higher-order truths of chmess' --you might like to see my little warning essay about this on my website. The URL is http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chmess.pdf. It might amuse you. (It infuriates some philosophers, but not the ones I respect.

As a contributor to public debates as well as within academia, how would you charactertise the contribution that philosophers are making to contemporary civic discourse (other academics have suggested various things from philosophy making only a marginal contribution to the contribution it makes being restricted only to the biggest names in philosophy because it is only those people the media is interest in, perhaps because they represent a particular position that can spark a confrontational debate)?

Again, I think those who have expressed these opinions are largely correct. Many philosophers today actually shrink from the public arena, and the political arena. Even those who are actively engaged in political activity often divorce it quite strictly from their philosophical activity, and they are right to do so. Some philosophical research is about as remote from application to political issues as research in chemistry or ancient Egyptian religion.

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, who share the prejudice of many others in academia. Carl Sagan was long denied election to the National Academy of Science even though his science was rigorous and important and eminently qualified him for election. His 'popularizing' was held against him, as if it made him a lightweight. Ed Wilson suffers similar underestimation in some quarters. This seems to be a perennial attitude in academia, not at all restricted to philosophers, so I consider it a cost of doing business, and don't take it personally. 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" (and hence ignorable by the heavyweights). But their students don't ignore these arguments.

On a more personal level, could you summarise why philosophy continues to engage you (again, other academics say various things from pure intellectual pleasure through to engagement with meaning of life-type questions)?

I consider myself to be incredibly lucky to be able to spend my time and energy working on the most tantalizing and fascinating of conceptual problems - of consciousness and free will, meaning (in many senses) and causation, not to mention (more recently) God and religion. These are the big, fat hot-button philosophical topics, and I have managed to engage them constructively and professionally. (I actually get to DO what most young students thinking of entering philosophy dream of doing!) But it isn't the emotional oomph of these issues that holds me; it is the conceptual importance of FINDING ANSWERS that will help us solve the scientific problems. If people outside of cognitive neuroscience and related fields lost their fascination with these topics (if cognitive neuroscience was about as interesting to the general public as. say, the cladistic analysis of invertebrate lineages) I'd still be captured by the topics.

On the relationship between science and philosophy, there is model of philosophy that is quite prevalent whereby it is envisaged as, say, the midwife of scientific disciplines - physics and psychology being two examples. Is this how you view your own work on consciousness or would it be better to describe it as a dialogue with modern science, clarifying questions, suggesting further lines of research and so on.

I think the midwife image is just about right. I say, along with many predecessors, that philosophy is what you are doing when you don't yet know what the right questions are. Once you ask the right questions (and know why these are the right questions), your attempt to answer them is not philosophy but . . . whatever it is - science, history, economics, . . . So philosophy is inescapably informal, more like art than science, a matter of imaginatively poking around and trying things out--with plenty of rigorous criticism of those attempts, but still, it's the bold strokes of imagination that do the heavy lifting. At its best (when it is well informed in the discipline whose questions it is trying to refine and improve), it makes significant contributions. But it's chief risk are flights of fantasy that may only divert the fantasists (while diverting the attention of more reality-based researchers from the questions they could more fruitfully pursue).