I can’t think of one serious “public intellectual” who says that “philosophy is outdated or useless” and I’d be curious to have a name or two.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Hawking_contra_Philosoph...
"Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson has claimed philosophy is not “a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world”;"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neil-degrasse-tyson-and-the-v...
Feynman was also frequently snarky about philosophy. But he is not of our times.
The main problem with philosophy of science nowadays is that not enough scientists act as philosophers.
The things targeted as "continental philosophy" are mostly meaning-of-life questions. Those aren't "useful", but they're important to people. It's no more useless than literature or video games or skiing, which you don't need but are exactly what people do when they're not doing things that they are required to do.
Not all "continental philosophy" is done well, and the vagueness of the question means that it's hard to distinguish rigorously between "well done" and "not well done". But that doesn't diminish meaning, or value, that people find in it.
Maybe it's my bent of mind but analytic philosophy just seems "reasoned" in a way that continental traditions are not.
But a huge swath of human activity isn't reasoned. A lot of human activity is spent just sitting around wondering what it all means, trying to live a "good" life, and wondering for that matter what "good" even means. Those are unscientific questions (or at least, we lack anything close to a science for discussing them), but it doesn't make them unimportant.
Those are the questions the "continentals" are usually working on. In my opinion, they're at their worst when they're trying to sound analytical about it. The more rigorous they get, the more they make it clear that they're actually pretty bad at rigor. Derrida is the most obvious example, and honestly I have only the word of his defenders that he's somehow trying to undercut rationality rather than simply being a charlatan.
In the end I treat the continentals the way I treat fans of soccer: I'm glad you're having a good time and finding meaning in what you're doing. That's worth it. But I'm gonna get irritated if you insist that I must find meaning in it as well. Maybe I will, maybe I won't, but the harder you insist the less interested I get.
Next, it's worth quoting from the conclusion of the article defending philosophy against Hawking:
> No doubt there is a fair amount of ill-informed, obtuse, or ideologically angled philosophy that either refuses or tries but fails to engage with the concerns of present-day science. One can understand Hawking’s impatience – or downright exasperation – with some of the half-baked notions put around by refuseniks and would-be engageniks alike.
People justifiably take issue with some aspects of philosophy (postmodernism, for example, and its misuse of scientific terminology, as exposed in Bricmont & Sokal's Intellectual Impostors), and a few scientists certainly overshoot in their criticism, or make it unduly broad.
But I don't think it's accurate to claim that "today the 'public intellectuals' often say philosophy is outdated or useless".
Lastly, even if one thinks that philosophy is largely useless today, that doesn't imply at all that one considers "21st-century American values [...] the best, final ones, never to be questioned again".