Food for thought

"It began as a personal crisis - combined with what I saw as a societal one," explains the 48-year-old Virginian, a magazine journalist before his Damascene conversion in 1996. "Americans had become so divided that they wouldn't even entertain views which differed from their own. I saw it among friends, on so-called dialogue shows on radio and TV - a type of mindless browbeating and one-upmanship. At the same time my writing was becoming formulaic, I had left my marriage, my best friend had just committed suicide. Starting Socrates Café was my way of trying to figure things out."

Naming his project after a pot-bellied fifth century philosopher - famously forced to drink hemlock for refusing to parrot establishment nostrums - was a tribute to the influence of his Greek immigrant grandparents, who arrived at New York's Ellis Island in the 1920s. "I read Plato's Socratic dialogues from the age of 13, thanks to my grandmother," recalls Phillips, who would later cement his interest with a masters degree in philosophy. "She always said I had Socrates blood in me - and so in 1996 I had this idea to help bring philosophy back to the people."

His first informal gathering convened in a New Jersey coffee shop, where random strangers contributed questions - What is a good death? What is funny? Is the unexaminedlifeworthliving?-anddebated whichever got most votes. Determinedly democratic, Phillips saw his role as facilitator as simply to encourage the Socratic method: probing for built-in assumptions, logicalinconsistenciesandpossible alternative views. Nothing was taken for granted: the first questioners even wondered if life could be over-examined.

But apparently not. Ten years later there are more than 500 Socrates Cafés from Albuquerque to Afghanistan, meeting in schools, prisons, churches, cafés, libraries, universities, parks and online. "I still can't believe how it's taken on a life of its own," says Phillips, who saw the most dramatic increase in hunger for rational debate after 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. "Americans are a pretty faddish bunch usually, and I thought this would long ago have gone by the wayside, but the momentum just keeps building."

Once the province of tweedy academics, philosophy has been enjoying a much wider renaissance, thanks to best-selling populariserssuchasAlaindeBotton. Scotland, proud birthplace of David Hume andAdamSmith,isevenpilotinga schemetoteachSocraticdialogueto Clackmannanshire nursery school children.

What's distinctive about Phillips, however, is his conviction that the forensic scalpel of inquiry is equally handy in the fleshy quagmire of the human heart - a tool for loving as much as thinking. It certainly worked for him: he met the love of his life at a philosophy session.

"I wasn't looking for love, I was still trying to figure myself out," recalls Phillips. "But then one week nobody turned up at the café until this Mexican woman walked in 15 minutes late, and everything went out of the window. She wanted to discuss the question: what is love?" Cecilia Chapa Vargas, an indigenous rights campaigner from Chiapas, already had a bachelor's degree in philosophy, but Phillips's interest was far from academic."Weprobablytalkedabout Plato's Symposium, but I didn't really focus on the dialogue that night, I was just mesmerised," he admits. "I don't know if there is such a thing as love at first sight, but we just became inseparable."

The couple subsequently married and co-foundedthenon-profitSocietyfor Philosophical Inquiry, moving constantly between rented rooms from 1997 to 2000, planting new groups across America and the globe. "She seems to thrive on being a gypsy, just like me," he says admiringly. "We both pretty much believe that Socrates Café at its best is kind of like a love-in, where people get together as strangers and leave like long-lost friends or relatives."

Speaking from the Mexican highland city of San Cristobal de las Casas - where the couple finally settled long enough to buy a house following the birth of Calliope last August - Phillips's cultured southern drawl brims with a rare quality of simple happiness. Living frugally off grants, donations from well-wishers and the proceeds of various books, he trademarked Socrates Café only to ensure that groups remained strictly non-profit.

"The best venues are the ones with the fewest gatekeepers," he says. "In America it's the public library, because it attracts people from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. In Mexico and Latin America it's the plazas, because they're used to oddballs just starting up. In New York City it's the subway - I just get on the train with this dog-eared sign that says Welcome To Socrates Café. I've taken it all over the world. In Japan we parked ourselves in Hiroshima Peace Park for the day and had this beautiful dialogue about what makes life worth living. I'm hoping we can work the same kind of magic in the UK."

HUDDLED round a corner table in Edinburgh's Filmhouse bar, Britain's first registered Socrates Café is applying itself earnestly to the issue: "Is money the new love?" It's a slightly loaded question, albeit democratically arrived at, and civilisation seems more or less doomed before we've even finished the first coffee of the morning. Ping-ponging betweenpesterpower,blameculture, working mothers, paid-for sex and designer trainers, we're about to write off modern society as a loveless consumer hell of anonymous chain stores, when a devil's advocate pipes up from the corner.

"Ilikeanonymity,"saysLisa,a30-something home help with proud working-class credentials. "I like Tesco - I don't want to go to a corner shop and banter with the shopkeeper about the fact that I'm buying more chocolate even though I bought chocolate yesterday."

There is a pause as everyone clocks this unexpected new angle. If not exactly on the subject of love, it certainly challenges the rose-tinted clichés of community. "We're always harking back to this golden age and saying, Wasn't it better when everyone knew each other?'" agrees Stuart, a retired teacher. "Well - not if you were gay, or in an abusive relationship "

This is my fourth philosophy café since Edinburgh'sinauguralmeetinglast autumn, and so far we've discussed "What is independence?", "Why do we humans sabotage our own plans?" and that perennial chestnut: "What is God?" We never reach a conclusion, but my brain and assumptions always seem to get a healthy pummelling.

"A few of us who aren't religious just wanted a place to talk about things that matter,"explainsorganiserAnneHay, who first stumbled on one of Phillips's discussions while on holiday in Las Vegas. "I've been in churches and other organisations, but they all have their hierarchies and agendas. And anyway, we like hanging out in cafés."

The problem with today's question is that love can mean anything from sexual euphoria to emptying your mother's bedpan - and that's before you even start on its vexed relationship with money.

Phillips is the first to agree that some finer definitions are needed - which is why his new book, Socrates In Love, subdivides that old devil into eros (sexual), filios (brotherly), storge (familial), agape (communal) and xenia (stranger). "It was my grandmother who first taught me the five Greek forms of love," he says. "The coolest oneIthinkisxenia,whichisloveof strangers or love of the other, which is especially fascinating at a time when there's such demonisation of anyone unlike us. But to the Greeks you couldn't love your significant other' as much as humanly possible unless you also strove to love your community and society and people on the opposite side of the globe. It's both very ethereal and pragmatic at the same time."

Not that every group proves quite as altruistic. "I find it varies wildly," he says. "Some come to sip cappuccino and to pontificate, some to name-drop and quote-drop - but even if just one comes with a willingness to open themself up and leaves with a somewhat altered outlook then to me that's paydirt."

And the less abstract the better. Phillips finds the best philosophers are children, mainly because of their insatiable appetite for the question: "Why?" As one Californian fourth grader told him: "I think Socrates is anyone who's not afraid to keep asking questions even when everyone else wants him to stop."

Nopriorknowledgeof Plato or Schopenhauer is necessary - and despite threemastersdegrees and a part-finished PhD, Phillips is clearly more bothered by "intellectual masturbation" than the opposite problem of members baring their life histories in impromptu self-actualisation sessions.

"We'reveryanti-guru,butthereis definitely a therapeutic content," he says. "Sometimes we need the considered input of others in order to arrive at higher truth ourselves."

Despite his almost evangelical-sounding use of the word "mission", Phillips has never found a home within established religion or, for that matter, atheism. "I'm open to the possibility of there being a God," he says. "I'm open to most things. There are operating premises for establishing that you and I are having this conversation, but can I prove it once and for all? I don't think so - and that's OK."

But is all this openness viable in the long term? Don't humans need some kind of practical certainty? "I think that philosophy has its limits," offers Phillips. "When I found out that my mother had colon cancer, I started writing poetry as my way of dealing with it. It would never have been enough to just philosophically delve into it - we need poetic inquiry, artistic inquiry, religious inquiry at different times."

Ultimately, though, can eight strangers meeting in a coffee shop make any difference to Iraqi bomb victims or abducted children - or anything else in what we like to call the real world? "I honestly don't know," admits Phillips. "All I know is that people are coming out of their living rooms and engaging with folk they would otherwise never have occasion to meet - and if there's any hope for bridging gaps between people who are very different, it's in making these types of connection."

This,claimsAnneHay,isnosmall achievement - even if it doesn't get us much closer to understanding love. "Actually, I think there's an aspect of love at work here," she says, disbanding the Edinburgh Socrates Café for another month. "You know, doing the work of trying to hear the opposite point of view. Perhaps love is about listening."

Socrates in Love: Philosophy For A Passionate Heart (Norton, £14.99) by Christopher Phillips is launched with an informal discussion on love at Word Power Books, West Nicholson Street, Edinburgh, at 7pm on Thursday, June 7, (www.word-power.co.uk) The Socrates Café at Edinburgh Filmhouse café bar takes place on the second Sunday of each month, 11am. For information on how to start a Socrates Café, see www.philosopher.org