A Dutch philosopher, Eric Hoekstra, recently spent seven days in a wooden barrel. The burly academic from Leeuwarden University occupied a large, upturned tub, placed next door to a bookshop, as part of the Netherlands’ celebration of a ”national month of philosophy”.

Hoekstra (left) spent the days chatting to interested passers-by: ”Lots of people visited me, some were shy and just sneaked a look in. Children laughed out loud. Others talked for a while, expressing a more profound interest in what I was doing.” The most popular topics of conversation were stress in western society, the modern addiction to luxury, and our habit of repeating pleasures so often that they stop being pleasurable - genotsbevrediging, as the Dutch call this feeling of let-down.

This highbrow conversation with strangers was in keeping with the aim of Hoekstra’s experiment - to remind people of the origins of philosophy in ancient Greece. ”The idea first came to me as a consoling fantasy. I thought about having no obligations, not having to do anything, and the fantasy cheered me up. Then, the idea struck me that I could develop the fantasy into something different, a feat for drawing attention to the month of philosophy, to different and simpler ways of living, and to ancient philosophy.”

The original man in a barrel was Diogenes, the founder of the Cynic school of philosophy. The label ”cynic” comes from the Greek word for dog - after Plato, a philosophical rival of Diogenes, accused him of living like one. Diogenes adopted his alternative lifestyle after watching a mouse scurrying about in the gloom. The rodent was not bothered by the dark, nor by discomfort and dreary food. And then Diogenes had a revelation: self-sufficient simplicity is the key to a happy life.

This experiment was unlikely to have happened in England or the US. While many continental philosophers have broadly followed the ancient Greeks in seeking answers to life’s big questions through thinking about who they are and what they experience, English-speaking countries have concentrated instead on analytic philosophy - testing propositions through logical analysis. They explore abstruse ideas such as ”conceptual clarification” and ”logical consistency”. It is a process deliberately divorced from personal experience.

The difference in approach led to a frequently acrimonious split among the ranks of Big Thinkers. It’s a fight that’s largely happened in private, but in recent years many interested, ordinary people have started to take an interest in popular philosophy and what it can teach us. As a result, the tensions long hidden in academia are coming out into the open for the first time, and it’s already changing the way philosophy is viewed by both ordinary people and the academic community.

The last great British philosopher who linked experience and thought - and wrote about it in an accessible way - was Bertrand Russell. But by the 1950s the connection had broken. A new mood about philosophy took hold: it should be more rigorous. These philosophers called their philosophy ”analytic philosophy” - to underline the belief that philosophy’s proper subject material is not the personal but, rather, logic and propositions. Many students entering universities in the English-speaking world between the 1950s and 1970s would have felt the disconnection between the personal and the philosophical was obvious, right and permanent.

Now the mood seems to be shifting, slowly, mainly because high-profile academics working in the strongholds of English analytic philosophy want their discipline to become engaged again. ”Philosophy has become far too professionalised,” says Sir Anthony Kenny, a former Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and one of Britain’s most distinguished living philosophers.

He laments that much of the work done in philosophy departments today 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 takes years to master. ”But philosophers don’t have information that is unavailable to others. In philosophy the best of it should be available to all. It is for this reason that I admire Russell, even if I don’t always agree with him, because of the way he could write serious philosophy that was readable to a wide public,” Kenny says.

The author and philosopher A.C. Grayling believes philosophy itself risks becoming impoverished when it doesn’t care about its wider application. ”Spending time contributing to the public conversation is a kind of duty. And philosophical ideas and perspectives become impoverished when there is a lack of it,” Professor Grayling observes. ”Ten years ago when I started writing for a popular audience, it was looked down upon. Now this does not happen. We are recovering a sense of philosophy as taking part in a popular debate.”

There’s now a huge public interest in popular philosophy, with Alain de Botton the best-known author in this genre. He covers issues such as friendship, desire, death and children, but has a profound ambivalence towards contemporary philosophy. ”Around 2000, when I wrote a book on philosophy [The Consolations of Philosophy], the academics became hysterical that I was an interloper on their hallowed ground,” he says. ”Philosophy is largely owned by the academy and defined by its interests. These interests tend to be narrow and the way one is allowed to write in academia almost guarantees that no more than a handful of people will bother to investigate subjects. That’s why philosophy is largely irrelevant in this country. However, there is clearly a great appetite among people to know what philosophy is. My own feeling is that this curiosity is generally abused.”

Havi Carel, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of the West of England, goes beyond the war of words to show how great thinkers can make a real improvement to modern lives. She has LAM disease, an incurable lung condition. When she was diagnosed, it was a brutal shock. However, reading the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and the German thinker Martin Heidegger - who sought to address the ancient questions afresh - she found new strength.

”Philosophy gave me the capacity to reflect not just emotionally but rationally on my illness,” Dr Carel says. It enabled her to take a broader perspective on her feelings of anger and envy, lessening their destructiveness. Epicurus taught his followers not to be afraid of death, since death is non-existence, that is, absolutely nothing. He also pursued things that produce happiness, such as friendship and small pleasures.

Carel says: ”The good news is that although we are shackled by some objective features of life, such as our health, we can choose to focus on these other good things. It is not only me who has realised that much of what worries us is, in fact, trivial and meaningless. Both philosophy and being ill enable you to apply this insight to your own life.”

Mark Vernon is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, London and author of ”Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life” (Palgrave Macmillan).

Ask a philosopher...

Q: Why do philosophers make seemingly simple questions so complicated?

A: There is an ancient saying (in Greek) - Chalepa ta kala - meaning ”Noble things are difficult...” Not all things that are valuable are difficult. but some are. And part of their value, I think, derives from the difficulty.

Nicholas D. Smith, Lewis and Clark College.

Q: What’s it like to be another person?

A: That’s a really good question. I guess the answer is: it feels normal. Because it feels normal to them, and so if you are that person, then feeling like they do feels normal to you.

Mark Crimmins, Stanford University.

Q: Is there a logical reason why most people prefer their own opinions to someone else’s?

A: Consider philosophical opinions. Why do I bother to form my own opinions? Why don’t I just agree with everything the famous American philosopher Hilary Putnam says, since he is so smart? I guess part of the answer is that we don’t just care about maximising the chances of having the right answer: we also think there is a particular value to working things out for oneself.

Peter Lipton, University of Cambridge.

These answers are edited from ”I Am, Therefore I Think: Philosophers Answer Your Questions About Love, Nothingness and Everything Else...” (Sceptre).