It is a balmy afternoon. The tutorial room windows are open to catch a breeze, should one come along. In a small group, all eyes are on a whiteboard where the proposition "aRb" has just been written. To the students, it is a perfectly reasonable, even basic piece of philosophical communication. As the afternoon progresses other, more complex propositions will be added to the whiteboard, all of which are central to an understanding of Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning.



The other students - all fourth year - may be as fluent in this language as they are at home with such terminology as "obtaining" and "non-obtaining states of affairs". But it is a foreign language to me and, for a moment, I wonder what I'm doing here in the Old Arts building of Melbourne University when I could be at home reading a book composed of words that I recognise sufficiently enough to follow without thinking too much about the process.



But if the bookshops and local libraries are any indication, it is not a lonely impulse that has brought me here. Philosophy, the dustiest of subjects, formerly the preserve of a few, has gone public. Philosophers are not just writing books for themselves any more or the select circle in which they move, but for "the people" - out there. And people are reading them, or, at least, they are buying them.



In literature, philosophers have usually been depicted as vague, unworldly - even other-worldly - figures. George Moore, professor of moral philosophy in Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers , is just such a character. He stands on stage attempting to establish the existence of God oblivious to the fact that his domestic world is descending in mayhem all around him. He is a hero, but an unlikely one in the tweed and corduroy tradition of philosophy professors.



These days, though, philosophers are engaging with the world more readily than before. During the past 10 years there has been a spate of books intent, not so much on taking philosophy to streets, as taking it to the dinner parties. And they're a mixed bag. Many are just crass attempts to cash in on the movement - the worst kind of arranged marriage between publishing and opportunistic editors. Such books usually attempt to meld popular culture and philosophy.



The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am, is part of a series that also includes The Simpsons and Philosophy, Seinfeld and Philosophy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy and so on. It is basically cultural studies with bits of philosophy thrown in. But if you're not into The Sopranos, Seinfeld, Buffy or that whole other reality of cult US TV - and this series, which is aimed at the American market (and got a thumping from some US reviewers), assumes you most definitely are - then it is of distinctly limited value.



It's funny enough in that wise-cracking TV way; the anthologists spending a lot of time recounting the plot lines of old episodes of The Sopranos , then telling you how it all relates to, say, Machiavelli, and how Machiavelli's world "ain't all that far removed from Jersey" and therefore from Tony Soprano's world.



Not all recent publications, though, assume that the way to a philosophical readership is through popular culture. The rise and rise of the English populariser Alain de Botton is often seen as emblematic of philosophy's movement into the mainstream. He is glib and superficial to some, part of a quite acceptable tradition of populist writing to others. His The Consolations of Philosophy was, and continues to be, a middlebrow bestseller. There are six of his books at my local library. All were out when I inquired about them, all with a waiting list between five and 10, and one of them, his latest, Status Anxiety , had a waiting list of 45.



De Botton was one of the first of the new guard to write specifically for the popular market, to write about the value of philosophy in everyday life (and literature, e.g. How Proust Can Change Your Life ) and how it can be a source of comfort when life starts to hit you with its big guns and coming home from work can feel like coming home from a bad day on the Somme.



Status Anxiety copped a right old thumping in some quarters and, in many ways, because he wears the stained label of the "populariser", de Botton pays for it. To many, the populariser is by definition superficial - a pretender. But it might also be argued that popularisers such as de Botton belong to a long tradition of writers who felt bound to break free of academia and the intelligentsia in order to take their ideas to the people.



It is not difficult to see why de Botton has become so popular. He is an entertainer and he makes few demands on his reader - or no demands at all, depending on the reader. He embodies the notion that this is easy, anybody can do it. You don't have to be an egghead to read philosophy, you can even read it on the conveyer belt at your local gym, thus combining your physical and intellectual work-outs and saving valuable time.



It doesn't do any great harm, except to offend some purists. On the other hand, the promise that it is all pretty easy is the kind of expectation that produces a sort of DIY intelligentsia, because, in the end, the inescapable fact is that it is not easy. It is, ultimately, difficult to understand complex ideas. They have to be taken in slowly, over a period of time, which the readers of fast-food philosophy presumably don't have.



It took years - of scholarship and writing - for Martin Heidegger to write Being and Time and it is not unfair to suggest that to understand it takes a little more than a slick summary. That, hopefully, will give an accurate basis to work on - but to go further requires effort, time and the kind of reading you can't do on the gym's conveyer belt.



One who has managed to walk the populist tightrope with great aplomb is the English literary critic and cultural theorist Terry Eagleton. From his early big hit Literary Theory - which he refers to as his "bluffer's guide" - to his most recent work, the brilliantly concise After Theory, he has continued to be that rare academic beast, a critical and commercial success. And because so much critical theory requires a knowledge of philosophy, he did, to an extent, trailblaze the whole notion of popularising complex philosophers - especially German thinkers such as Edmund Husserl and Heidegger - who directly inform much literary theory.



More than likely there are a variety of reasons why people are turning to popular philosophy.



Could it be that philosophy is now fulfilling a need that would once have been fulfilled by institutionalised religion? The English literary critic F.R.Leavis wrote in 1950 that "to believe anything (and I do not mean merely to believe in some religion) will probably become more difficult as time goes on". For Leavis, as for Matthew Arnold, literature functioned like a faith. They believed that humans could find sustenance for the soul through poetry and fiction and it may well be that philosophy is performing a similar function now - or at least, that increasing numbers of people want it to.



What people might have once got from the local priest or just the quiet sanctuary of the local church, they are now, to an extent, seeking from writers such as de Botton. And I don't just mean faith (the New Age movement did that), I mean guidance in how to live a happy, meaningful and "good" life. That is, the basic concerns of moral philosophy.



In reviewing de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy , the Irish novelist John Banville proclaimed philosophy the "new rock'n'roll" and de Botton its Colonel Tom Parker. Philosophy may be the new rock'n'roll, but de Botton is more likely its Pat Boone. For, just as Boone gave rock a sanitised, wholesome legitimacy (the conduit between the real thing and the mainstream), de Botton reads, so often, like a 19th-century vicar (his status-indifferent horse and jinker parked outside) explaining to the flock of his readership how the thoughts of ancient philosophers are still relevant today.



If that old gang of yours has dropped you and you are feeling left out and unpopular, Socrates can console you. If your life is one damned trial after another, read Nietzsche. And so on, and so on. There is something pastoral in the way de Botton seeks to use philosophy as a way of providing people with moral and existential guidance. Whether you think there's any great substance in what he provides is another matter.



It may also be that reading books such as this is just a new form of good old cultural capital. The rushed business executive, market analyst or stockbroker gulps down a few words of wisdom with his or her morning coffee, then spouts something about Descartes during lunch with everybody that matters in earshot. Many of the current philosophy publications have the glossy look of books that are designed to be left lying around on coffee tables, advertisements signalling the possibility that there just might be something other than the pursuit of profit going on in the household; that the possessor of these books has a cultured side to display, rather like the intended readers of Baldessare Castiglione's guide for the Renaissance courtier.



The Courtier , first published in 1528 when a brash, new middle class was just emerging and felt itself to be in need of a civilising touch, is in some ways a precursor of the kinds of populist publications we're seeing now. Part of Castiglione's idea was that the well-versed courtier would set an example to the rest of society. There would be a filter-down effect - not money, but manners and learning. Perhaps de Botton and others are attempting to do something similar.



There is also something of the self-congratulatory in a lot of these books; they make people feel good about themselves for having snacked on edible summaries of the great minds - a bit like congratulating yourself on being able to translate lines of a foreign language on a billboard. But being able to translate "J'ai un penchant pour toi", doesn't mean you can speak French. Of course, everyone wants to feel good about themselves - as long as it's not based on the delusion that we know more than we really do.



But although many of these philosophy publications resemble self-help books, they are a varied bunch. Like most things literary, what works and what doesn't work often comes down to the quality of the writing and to, as Henry James put it, just how good the mind of the writer is. A. C. Grayling's What is Good? and Simon Blackburn's Think and Being Good are examples of publications that are written specifically for the general public by established and respected philosophers.



Neither Grayling or Blackburn talk down to their readers, nor do their books contain dumbed-down philosophy or skate relentlessly over the surface, hesitant to go in too deep too often lest they lose their audience. Books such as these, I suspect, represent a genuine attempt to reach out to a wider than academic readership without compromising the subject.



And it's not just books. In Paris, on the Place de la Bastille, there is a cafe called Le Pharaon where, every Wednesday night, philosophers address the patrons, then engage in spirited discourse. In Melbourne, the Borders bookshop in Prahran provides a similar venue. A place where people interested in philosophy can meet (every third Tuesday of the month) and discuss what they've been reading.



In the end, of course, there is no substitute for reading the texts. But seriously, who sits down on a quiet Sunday afternoon and wiles away a few leisurely hours reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ? Similarly, few people have the time to return to the tutorial room and read the primary texts under the guidance of trained philosophers.