The title on this shiny white paperback sounds at first like a scrappy riposte to Heidegger, Deleuze & Guattari, and all the various luminaries who've posited titles along the lines of What Is Philosophy?, but the subtitle (hidden away on the inside flap) betrays this book's humbler ambitions. Contemporary Philosophy in Action is a disclaimer, telling us not to expect some sweeping introduction to the major philosophical positions of our time, or a unified theory that could really rattle some heretofore unheralded paradigm. It asks us to sit back and watch some everyday philosophers do what they do. A few of these philosophers are all-but-dissertation grad students; many of them are untenured professors. Most of them are not from the United States. And that's probably why their anthology is so approachable.

The problem with a lot of American philosophy can be summed up by this excerpt from the glossary: "Analytic philosophy: A twentieth-century movement in philosophy that began with the view that we can understand complex thoughts by breaking them down into simple elements"--and that then, we might add, wasted no time devolving into utter tedium. The definition continues, "Known for its rigorous employment of logic, [analytic philosophy] remains dominant in the United States and Britain." "Dominant" is one way to put it--"suffocating" is another. For those of us who are not philosophy wonks, reading analytic philosophy can be disillusioning: It's sad to accept that logic often operates in inverse proportion to sense. If you've ever tried to get something done in a meeting conducted by parliamentary procedure, you already understand the selective tyranny of rigor. Logic, too, is deceptively permissive with those who have mastered the rules.

This is not to say that the contributors to What Philosophy Is have thrown the logic out with the analytic philosophy. But since they aren't holed up in the perverse US of A, they feel free to draw upon philosophical traditions that are a bit less frustrating for the lay reader. Continental philosophy, for example, is much livelier--sexier, really--than its counterpart across the Atlantic. (It pops up in American universities from time to time, but usually in classes on the history of philosophy or, in English departments, under the guise of "theory.") And What Philosophy Is doesn't stop with philosophical traditions. The assembled writers also borrow liberally from other disciplines.

Interdisciplinarity is, in fact, the anthology's organizing principle. From "Political Philosophy" and "Philosophy and Science" to "Philosophy and Literature" and "Therapeutic Philosophy," the section headings let slip a little secret that the publisher's marketing department seems to have glazed over: The essays grew out of a series of seminars that were conceived under the aegis of something called the "Philosophy As..." project. At the start of the anthology, we aren't told why provisionally defining "philosophy as" something else entirely sounded to the project architects like a good way to get at the heart of what "philosophy is." Does this assumption commit the contributors to anti-essentialism before they even type their first words? Or should we think about this leap as a fecund Derridean typo?

One of the more exhilarating essays in the collection is Eran Dorfman's "Philosophy as an 'As,'" but with its foreboding "State of the Art" stamp and placement in the center of the book, it hardly serves as a justification of method. The final essay (by David Gamez, one of the editors) finally attempts to explain the benefits of such an approach, but it's quite narrow in scope and you get the sense that he might be on the defensive.

And the method does bear some unfortunate fruit. There's "Philosophy as Logo" (Naomi Klein, what have you wrought?), which gets mired in some nonsense about philosophy branding itself, and there's "Philosophy as Therapy," which is weird and niche-y and reeks of self-help (the case study is a midlife crisis). But just as many essays are intriguing and energetic and will point you in all kinds of new directions. Bence Nanay's systematic rebuttal of the evolutionary explanations of Daniel Dennett and others is extremely interesting (I'd love to read Dennett's response), and Simon Glendinning's "Philosophy as Nomadism" made me think I might be able to tolerate Wittgenstein. Which is probably false, but it was a nice fantasy nonetheless.