Philosophy is very dear to me and I loved studying it, so I cannot let this story stand without having commented. I'm not going to come to its defense other than to point to several references as the works of many philosophers over several thousands years have done so much more eloquently through their philosophical works than anything that I could even dream to equal.
I'll just say that studying the works Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Kant, Thoreau, Hume, Nietzsche, G.E Moore, Russell, A.J. Ayer, Popper, Schopenhauer, Sartre and many others made me a better and more rounded person. They taught me to think better, to argue logically and put things into perspective. I often don't succeed but those guys are always at the back of my head niggling about what I think and pushing me to evaluate or reevaluate what I am doing. They've altered my thinking and my perception of the world.
My profession isn't philosophy but moving electrons around or at least trying to make them do my bidding (sometimes I reckon they're the philosophers, not me). In many ways much of what I do involves the physical world and seemingly it couldn't be further away from philosophy— metaphysics —which, by definition, is above and beyond physics. However, I'd argue that those who only perceive the world through the mathematics of say Einstein's and Schrödinger's equations and debunk philosophy as base or at best a waste of time have missed the point. Likely they haven't studied philosophy so they've not considered that the way they've learned and gained knowledge is itself a philosophical study of practical value, namely epistemology. Science was once termed natural philosophy and many of the ways of thinking and learning are common to both.
It seems to me that conceptualizing quantum fields in QFT (or at least trying to) isn't that different a process to Berkeley conceptualizing whether the tree in the Quad exists when there's no one to look at it. No doubt the former is magnitudes more complex, and given that 250 years have passed since Berkeley's era approaches to thinking about such matters have become more nuanced and complex. In physics today causality is a central concept and David Hume refined Berkeley's propositions to incorporate inductive reasoning and causality. Philosophers fine-tuned the thinking process that eventually allowed inductive reasoning to conclude the Higgs particle actually exists despite that no one has ever seen it directly—even CERN's detectors never saw it, they've only ever detected the aftermath of its decay. Philosophy not only has practical purposes but it's a fascinating subject.
Then there are the books, some of the most significant and influential ever written, Republic, Leviathan, A Treatise of Human Nature, Social Contract, Critique of Pure Reason, Being and Nothingness, etc., etc. These are works of brilliant minds that have endured over the centuries—and they endured for so long for the very reason that many have valued their contents greatly.