It was more than 100 years ago Rudolf Steiner noted that the (German-speaking) public were no longer interested in academic philosophy in the way they had been a couple of generations earlier; the situation prevails - except when people get close to addressing metaphysical concerns about the ultimate nature of reality.
It was the 'epistemological turn' (away from metaphysics and towards epistemology - a focus on knowing, justification, logic etc) from the mid-1900s, that killed real philosophy - and thus spontaneous public interest in the subject. Since then, academic philosophers write purely for one another, the subject is free-spinning cog; its effect is subversive not constructive.
(Modern professional philosophers are often clever; but actually have nothing to be clever about. Hence the leading figures seem to project a peculiarly unjustifiable smugness, presumably based on the delusion that they are of the lineage of Socrates and Plato, rather than prime destroyers of that lineage...)
Revivals of philosophical interest are usually focused on 'middle-brow' but fundamental-problem-orientated work on the nature of the human condition - e.g. the popular existentialism of the 1950s epitomised by Colin Wilson, Robert Pirsig's writings on Quality from the 1970s, and the like (not much since Pirsig, however...); these tackling core aspects of the basis for living, meaning, purpose etc.
It seems the people want metaphysics! - even though they don't know the name, and would not like it if they did.
However they want metaphysics, although they don't realise it, because they need it - indeed they need it more than anything else; because it is unknown, unexamined and denied false-basic-assumptions about reality that have created and sustained the nihilism and despair which is at the root of modern self-hatred and covert-strategic suicide.
