RICHMOND, Va. — On a recent Sunday morning, it was business as usual at Classified Moto, a custom motorcycle shop in a former mule barn here.

The new bike that the shop built for Daryl Dixon, the righteous zombie hunter of the AMC series “The Walking Dead,” had recently made its debut (complete with crossbow rack), and a guy was at a workbench, making some spare parts. Meanwhile, in a corner, Matthew Crawford, whose independent custom-parts business is based at the shop, was talking with a reporter about Kant.

“I knew he was standing somewhere in the background,” Mr. Crawford said of the 18th-century German philosopher, one of the thinkers cited in his new book, “The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.” It took a lot of reading, he added, and hashing out with friends, to figure out just where.

Motorcycles and philosophy both count as shoptalk for Mr. Crawford, a wiry, soft-spoken 49-year-old decked out that day in a blue workshirt and retro-nerd glasses. In 2009, this University of Chicago-trained political philosopher turned mechanic scored a surprise best seller with “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” an impassioned defense of the skilled trades.