> charged with meretricious obscurity, italicized neologisms and occasional quasi-mathematical formulae and a travesty of scientific inquiry

Those are fair criticisms, actually. Continental philosophy (for continental Europe, not just French people) really loves complexity, and tends to see philosophy as something more wide than science, that embeds science as one of its parts - which gives them room to justify not even trying to tend to formality, like analytic philosophy (the US way, broadly) does. And from there, they play with words and concepts. A lot. Their main justification is that "wider than science", which could be simplified as: they're more about exploring imagination than trying to stick to science and realizing science doesn't really need them (my words, of course).