Philosophy: the latest answers to the oldest questions Nicholas Fearn Atlantic, 225pp, £17.99 ISBN 1843540665

The number of popular philosophy books being published is heartening. People are clearly dissatisfied with gross materialism, and want to reach beyond it. Sometimes, however, this trend seems like the ultimate in decadence. Pampered with massage and manicure, the leisured classes are now devoting themselves to honing their minds.

This book is not for those who seek the easy and emollient mind-massage. It is a young man's work - vigorous, bracing, demanding. "Now is an ideal time to take an audit of western philosophy," Fearn declares. His quest to find the "latest answers to the oldest questions" takes him to universities and private houses across America and Europe, where he interviews some of the world's foremost philosophers. His remit is to sum up what he hopes are the best available answers to three core questions: "Who am I? What do I know? What should I do?" Although these questions (and the many problems they embrace) have inspired philosophers through the ages, they have proliferated into meticulously technical minutiae that are too obscure for most general readers to understand. Fearn's triumph is to bridge the gap between glib, crowd-pleasing philosophy and the severely academic.

His is an ambitious project, and a much-needed one. Facing a homogeneous array of shiny-covered books in Waterstone's, how does the philosophy student, let alone the general reader, choose from among the gallimaufry of philosophers and the cornucopia of theories they put forward? Even before the latest surge of popular philosophy swelled the flood, it was difficult for philosophy students and autodidacts alike to have a sense of "where we've got to". Most philosophy books, whether for a popular audience or aimed at students, are organised chronologically in discrete chunks, each summarising what a particular philosopher at a particular stage of history said. You get some idea (you hope) of Kant's attempt to account for the way human beings perceive and interpret the world, and are thrilled that his theory seems to solve some of the difficulties in the theories of previous philosophers. But then you think: yes, but is he right, or right according to the latest thinking? How does his theory stand up after all the subsequent developments in science, and can it fit into them?

Fearn is on the case. In his chapter on "The Problem of Meaning", he sums up Kant's transcendental idealism, then sets it in "the Darwinian picture". He then links this to the recent externalist theories of Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge and Donald Davidson, about what it means to know, think about and refer to things in the world, just as he links the hoary question of innate ideas to "one of its modern incarnations, namely the nature-nurture question", and to Noam Chomsky's theories of the acquisition of language.

Sometimes, however, I wondered what was gained by the interviews. They didn't seem to add much to what is already in the interviewees' books (which, rather naughtily, are sometimes quoted as if the words were freshly and uniquely spoken to Fearn). The personal stuff about philosophers is fascinating, and succeeds in illuminating their thought without being ad hominem, but Fearn could have gleaned much of it without the trouble of travelling. Other than an astute and modest objection he makes to Daniel Chalmers, and the response to it, there is no real sense of interaction between him and his interviewees.

Fearn's youthful confidence and no-nonsense briskness can be exhilarating. The chapter dealing with the problem of knowledge, for instance, is illuminating and interesting on what is usually a dry, technical debate. But clever though Fearn is, his writing is sometimes too brisk and compressed; he should have lingered over some of the more difficult ideas, in order to explain them fully. The verve and vigour of his writing lead on occasion to insufficient clarity, even ambiguity, and as a result his book does not quite fulfil what it sets out to do.

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