The entry 'metaphilosophy' in the following work is useful: American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, by John Lachs (Editor), Robert Talisse (Editor), Routledge (December 7, 2007). The author of the entry is the editor in chief of the journal METAPHILOSOPHY. The entry in questions contains the following text, which I take to be about, at least primarily, American (United States) metaphilosophy. 'The 1940s and 1950s saw a diminished interest in metaphilosophical questions among many professional philosophers.  Then Richard Rorty's work in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in such books as The Linguistic Turn (1967) and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), explicitly raised metaphilosophical questions about the direction of philosophy and in the latter case hearkened back to some of the themes of Dewey's earlier work.  A growing interest in metaphilosophy led to the establishment of the philosophy journal Metaphilosophy in 1970.' The article says, also, that the twentieth century saw an increase in metaphilosophical interest (again, I take it, in the U.S. - and, presumably, what the increase was over was the nineteenth or late nineteenth century).

Hope this helps. I might add that philosophers, like everyone else, will in every case almost always spend more time doing what they do than thinking about the nature of what they are doing. Still, that is less true of so-called Continental philosophy, because the frequent (attempted) revolutions within that philosophy often extend to the very conception of philosophy.

Nick
PS: Sorry if the formatting has gone a bit awry in the above text.