"Serious" philosophy is alive and well. From what I hear, the latest trending areas are in ontology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Look up the bios of the younger faculty members in philosophy at the top schools to get a sense of what they do these days.

Here's one very smart guy I know, from Berkeley (previously at NYU and PhD from MIT), Seth Yalcin:

http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/y...

I get most of my philosophy gossip through occasional conversations with guys like Seth. You should make friends with a couple of people like this and talk to them sometimes. Nice break from everyday life.

There are two basic schools of academic philosophy, usually called analytical and continental.

Analytical philosophy LOOKS like English, but is in fact an extremely refined and precise mode of argumentation that takes a lot of practice to penetrate. It dominates the discipline today. In terms of thinking horsepower needed to understand the stuff, it is at least as hard as the toughest math I've dealt with. These guys construct arguments like Swiss watches. The level of argumentation on places like Quora is to their world what paper planes are to 747s.

Continental (basically old-school stream of consciousness rambling) that marked the classic European philosophers, is in disfavor these days. In America I think it is practically non-existent. That's a pity, because I think, when it is really deep people doing the rambling, the results are amazing.

This is the state in the core of the discipline, I think. Us layfolk can get a sense of how things work by reading some of the easier selections from some of the more accessible modern philosophers like David Lewis, Richard Stalnaker, Michael Bratman etc. The further back you go, the harder it gets.

There are also less established things going on at the periphery, at the interfaces with things like AI, linguistics and even experimental behavioral economics. The core people tend to be snooty about this stuff. True in any academic discipline.