Many subjects have debates about definition. For example, novelists and poet routinely argue about the ideal direction of novels and poems. But the debate in philosophy is unbalanced because of the way power is distributed in the field. In literature, a range of novelists – almost all of them freelance individuals – compete to argue their case. In philosophy, academic philosophers are the only people with power: they have multi-million pound departments, they can hire and fire, they have a stranglehold on journals. And they are hugely powerful next to the few individuals who write philosophy books on a freelance basis. The popular interest in philosophy is still very weak. The idea of having a philosophy career outside of academia is a precarious proposition. Hence the outrage when an academic outsider writes a book about philosophy which attracts an undue amount of public interest – and dares to challenge some of their underlying assumptions about philosophy's role. Academic philosophers, ever mindful of people moving in on their patch, get out the big guns and try to ensure that the interloper will never dare to stray on their path again. If a modest "populariser" is content to write a basic introduction, the sort of thing that might bring more eighteen year olds into departments, then that is just about OK. But beware anyone who approaches the subject with more literary and ambitious intentions. Beware anyone who refuses to see themselves as a vulgariser and makes a claim to be a philosophical writer.

Life being short, one has to pick the important battles and I don't consider this to be one (it falls under Mario Vargas Llosa's famous category of "two bald men arguing over a comb"). However, I hope there will be a time when there will be more room in the academic philosophical imagination for the discursive, thoughtful quasi-philosophical essay which has always guided me in my own writing. I am inspired by what Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Emerson used to write. What Virginia Woolf wrote. What Adam Phillips writes today in psychoanalysis. What Joseph Brodsky or Roland Barthes have produced in literary criticism. There should of course be a place for Bernard Williams's vision of philosophy. But why not also allow Montaigne to be an inspiration?