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I chugged a glass of soy sauce once. I'll never do that again. Or if I do, it'll be for more than $5.
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I don't think so. A few contemporary candidates are David Lewis's ON THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS and Timothy Williamson's KNOWLEDGE AND ITS LIMITS, but I don't feel right calling either of them a single favorite.
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There's no very interesting answer. I needed to study something, and I enjoyed philosophy, and was good at it. That's about it, really.
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I like this question. Let's see.
(1) I'm pretty confident that ethernet is on the way out. About ten years ago I was getting my first computer, and I decided not to get a modem. My parents thought I was crazy, but I was right. Ethernet is a safe guess to be a thing of the past much sooner than ten years from now. Let's get more ambitious...
(2) Relatedly to the prevalence of wifi or other always-available data connection sources, the increased reliance on cloud computing will have some dramatic effects. I think that USB thumb drives are going to be pointless very soon; just put what you want in your dropbox. I rarely use mine already. That one seems close and too easy, too, so I'll make a more dramatic pick in this genre as well: I think that in 2020, operating systems on hard drives will be a thing of the past. Personal hard drives in general will be much less useful, as we'll have no need to store our documents, or even our applications locally. The nervous among us will keep backups locked away in closets, but we'll store everything in the cloud day-to-day.
(3) This one's further out there. I don't know if I'm right, but I'll go ahead and predict the demise of the laptop computer. Desktops will always be there, because it will always be easier to make more powerful machines if we don't have to worry about size and weight. But as smartphones and tablets get better and more sophisticated, I think the value of the laptop will eventually be much more limited. (Because of the increase in cloud computing, it'll be much less important to have your own computer traveling; if you need something more powerful than your phone or tablet, you can log into your friend's desktop, or a public one, and have all your applications and files and settings, just like at home.) -
I'll be reasonably famous-for-a-philosopher. Probably never a household name.
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Quine might've won and Tarski might've one. That's not to say there's no fact of the matter -- I think I just expressed an objective fact (that's a might-counterfactual, not an epistemic 'might' -- but it's false that Quine would have won and it's false that Tarski would have won.
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Bet on:
Warriors over Mavericks in 2007 NBA playoffs
Appalachian State against Michigan in 2007
Giants against Patriots in Super Bowl 42
Scott Brown over Martha Coakley in 2010 MA Senate race -
You raise an interesting set of questions! I don't think that imagination is the right sort of thing to be a priori or a posteriori; ultimately, on my view, propositions, or ex ante justifications for propositions, are the sorts of things that are fundamentally a priori. Beliefs can be a priori derivatively, by being beliefs in a priori propositions on the relevant sorts of a priori grounds. We can also define a sense in which processes can be a priori -- inferring according to modus ponens, for example, seems like a plausibly a priori process. But if you want to understand 'imagination' at that kind of level, as a belief-forming process, the only answer, I think, is that imagination-involving processes are sometimes a priori, and sometimes a posteriori. Sometimes, imagination allows us further insight into genuine a priori grounds -- visualization of a geometric proof is maybe among the clearest paradigms -- while other times, the imaginative process is pretty clearly a posteriori, as some of Timothy Williamson's cases pretty clearly indicate.
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