Jonathan Barnes (Paris), Myles Burnyeat (emeritus, Oxford), Raymond Geuss (Cambridge), and Barry Stroud (Berkeley) answer the questions here. The questions and answers vary quite a bit in their interest and depth (Geuss is appropriately short and dismissive of some of the questions). A few excerpts.

Geuss, in response to a question about whether it is a loss that few philosophers now write in the form of dialogues, poems, aphorisms or the like any longer:

Academic philosophers should not give themselves too much importance. People are not going to stop expressing philosophical views in letters, or dialogues, or aphorisms just because this will not get them employment in a department of philosophy.

Stroud on whether only those with training can do philosophy:

I think of philosophy as a difficult intellectual endeavour. You have to learn how to do it, and it takes a lot of practice. Only those who know how to do it are really engaged in philosophy. It is possible to do serious philosophy outside an academic institution (many of the great philosophers of the past did it). But nowadays it is virtually impossible to earn a living and support oneself outside an academic institution while doing philosophy.

Barnes embarrasses himself mightily with this bizarre proclamation:

[M]ost philosophers who belong to the so-called analytical tradition are pretty poor philosophers. (Most academics who do anything are pretty poor at doing it; and philosophy, or so it seems to me, is a subject in which it is peculiarly difficult to do decent stuff. A modestly competent historian may produce a modestly good history book; a modestly competent philosopher has no reason to publish his modest thoughts.) But there's a big difference between the analyticals and the continentals: what distinguishes the continental tradition is that all its members are pretty hopeless at philosophy. Myself, I've read scarcely a hundred continental pages. I can't see how any rational being could bear to read more; and the only question which the continental tradition raises is sociological or psychological: How are so many apparently intelligent young people charmed into taking the twaddle seriously?

Having read "a hundred continental pages" (whatever exactly that means), Barnes dismisses as worthless two hundred years of philosophy since Kant on the European Continent, including multiple traditions (Idealism, Marxism, existentialism, phenomenology, etc.) encompassing tens of thousands of pages of canonical texts! Barnes, at least, claims elsewhere in the interview not to be a philosopher, but an historian of philosophy, which means that this disgraceful display of parochial ignorance can not be attributed to "analytic philosophy."

With regard to the question that provokes Barnes's outburst--regarding the "analytic/Continental divide," Geuss has a better and more apt answer:

Whether "analytic"/"continental" is an illuminating or well-formed dichotomy is less important than the general recognition that for as long as there have been philosophers, they have always disagreed with one another radically on a wide variety of important issues. In this they differ from scientists or mathematicians. Lack of consensus, if not active intellectual hostility, is the natural state for any body of philosophers. This seems to be a fact of life about the way humans respond to certain basic features of the human condition, and it seems more reasonable to accept this and try to understand why it is the case and what its implications might be than to try to fit philosophy into a mould derived from religion (the universal consensus of all orthodox believers) or from a certain conception of "strict science" (all biologists agree that the whale is a mammal, not a fish).

Which is to say that the best way to approach embarrassing displays of ignorance like Jonathan Barnes's would be through psychology, not philosophy!

