Its interesting why some of the humanities -- and particulary areas of philosophy -- are constantly defending their research program or the value of the discipline as a whole. Aparently, the folks of other segments of academia want see something useful. But it's not so sad, in some cases the dialog can happen, for example, in formal epistemology, the tentative to mix Bayesianism with conceptual analysis, trying to formalize concepts like 'coherence'.
I've long held CMU's philosophy department in high regard. One of their leading lights, Clark Glymour, recently published a short manifesto, which Brian Leiter summed up as saying that "the measure of value for philosophy departments is whether they are taken seriously by computer scientists."
Selected quote from Glymour's manifesto:
Also see the critique here, but I'd like to have Glymour working on FAI.