Best pragmatism philosophy books according to redditors

> M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

>At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

>One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words [slur for an African-American that begins with “n”] and [slur for a Jewish person that begins with “k”] will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Credit to Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country

Hey there!

This is a great question.

Mindfulness has been my greatest weapon to combat intrusive thoughts. (more so than medication and talk therapy)

When I first heard about Mindfulness, I sort of just brushed it off, because I thought the whole concept seemed superficial....Now, It has changed my life!

In mindfulness, you basically train your brain to respond differently to your negative thoughts.

When a thought comes, you try to evaluate it as a "third person." Try to become emotionally detached from the
situation. Don't try to push the thought out, or try to mask the thought with some kind of behavior.
When the thought comes, look at it and treat it like its just a thought, nothing more.

Ex: I sometimes have intrusive thoughts that a certain pain in my body is a fatal disease.

As I meditate, I evaluate the thought. I just look at it. I try to pretend I'm a third person looking at me, with the pain in my leg. I strip the fear out of it when I do it that way. Exposing myself to the thought also teaches my brain that the thought is not a threat, and therefore doesn't warrant feelings like "fear" or "disparity."

This is a really large concept to choke down all at once. One of the best resources is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:7 Steps to Freedom from Anxiety, Depression, and Intrusive Thoughts. It is a very fast read, and its only $3.99! Totally worth it.

Please let me know if you have anymore questions!

I recommend reading this: http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatism-Classic-Writings-H-S-Thayer/dp/0915145375

The Pragmatists offer really good ways to think about and justify metaphysical and epistemological beliefs. The whole "reality is an illusion" thing doesn't make sense when you think about the world pragmatically.

Whenever someone proposes some sort of metaphysical claim, simply try to conceive of the practical differences it would produce.
For example, if you were to think about the free will v. determinism debate pragmatically, you would want to ask yourself: if this is a deterministic world, what would a world where people have free will be like? and how would it differ from this world?

if you can't answer that question with something that isn't vacuous (e.g. "people would have free will in a world that isn't deterministic" [simply begs the question]), then the pragmatic presumption is that there is no meaningful difference between the two propositions. In other words, the distinction is literally meaningless and does not refer to a real metaphysical problem at all.

So, ask yourself: assuming this word is real, "how would this world differ if it were not real?" Assuming this world is not real, "how would this world differ if it were real?"

Exactly what I would recommend. The Thayer collection is were to go next.

You're welcome. I was actually in an Ni-Ti loop myself this morning. Writing thoughtfully about what I would recommend to another person going through the same thing helped me a lot as well.

In regards to my first point I'm glad you can relate. I believe us INFJs really shine when we feel there's something at stake for other people. It helps us get past the drama in our heads if we feel we can really help someone else or contribute to society.

I have the same kinds of friends, the ones who might hear me out, but might not give me what i really need when it comes to constructive feedback. I gravitate more towards other "feelers" in this regard. What I'm really looking for when trying to get out of my Ni-Ti loop are to have my emotions expressed and validated first, and to have the logic behind them dissected second. When I talk to my "thinker" type friends who give those black-and-white answers, they may technically be right in the logical sense, but they aren't able to provide the emotional solace I need to vent.

In regards to therapy, my experience is that I went to my primary care doctor first, through my work insurance. They gave me an assessment, and then recommended me to the psychiatry department. I did another assessment with psychiatry and they recommended me to an outpatient facility that accepts my work insurance. It took a while to get through that process, but I lucked out with the first therapist I found, and my copay is way lower than if I found a therapist outside of my insurance. This might not be suitable for everyone but it's an option.

In your self-help journey, I would also recommend working with a book that has specific exercises, like keeping a thought journal. Being able to re-assess your thoughts and feelings in your own words is really powerful, and is another way to get out of the Ni-Ti loop. This is the one I've been using and it has worksheets at the end you can use: https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy-Depression-attainable-ebook/dp/B01BBCKHGM/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=cbt+7+steps&qid=1556654413&s=gateway&sr=8-3

I don't have the heart to go point by point. The reason I brought up John Dewey was because he is an example of someone who held postmodern like views, but was obviously not a "postmodernist" in the Peterson sense. Richard Rorty, one of the people you quoted as a postmodernist, holds almost the same views as John Dewey; he even wrote a whole book about wanting to go back to a Dewey like left wing party. Rorty even considers himself a Neo-pragmatist, not a postmodernist. I brought up other traditions having "postmodern" thoughts to show that there is nothing actually malicious inherently in postmodern thought.

>The chain of signifier -> signifier -> signifier -> ... doesn't end. We never reach the signified. We never reach meaning. Truth doesn't exist, or if it does, we are permanently cut off from it. Why would you try to be rigorous in finding out what's true, if there's no such truth to find? Why would you be rigorous with anything, when rigor is just a meaningless set of meaningless standards that don't go anywhere?

The critique doesn't stop there. The point of the critique is not to say "oh, I guess we can never get past words." It is to point out that there is a fundamental problem with the signified-signifier relationship. One solution of the postmodernists: Think of words as part of the fabric of reality itself; Derrida said, the grammatical is the ontological. The problem of reaching reality, after deconstruction, is a kind of false problem: saying, "I have pain" doesn't describe pain behavior, it replaces it, so there is no intractable signifier-signified problem.

>You can analyze one language from within another language. This 'ultimate context', outside of any language, either doesn't exist or is something people can't access. How is any of this a problem?

So, you agree with postmodernists. Postmodernists aren't epistemic nihilists. Everything you think is nihilism is typically a first step in a critique that leaves the world uncertain, but not unmeaningful.

>"It is meaningless to speak in the name of -- or against -- Reason, Truth, or Knowledge." -Michel Foucault

"Reason," "Truth," and "Knowledge" have special meanings in this instance. He is referring to the transcendental versions of these. It is pointless to affirm of deny these because they are eternally reaffirming. Ex: I can always say "Being is" and say something entirely true 100% of the time, no matter what is in front of me. Foucault probably followed this line by showing how what we mean by these transcendental terms is in fact contingent upon power structures, and useful to authorities in affirming the status quo, and that they often actually has nothing to do with rigorous thinking.

What boggles my mind is that Postmodernism, a tradition that critiques those that are blinded by Idealism, is so often portrayed as being anti-reason.

>Why would you be rigorous with anything, when rigor is just a meaningless set of meaningless standards that don't go anywhere?

Rorty, after his critique in Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature, was more concerned than anyone about our values, since he understood that there is nothing immutable in them, that they were ultimately contingent. Contingent does not equal meaningless. You are the one conflating meaningful and contingent, not Rorty, not the postmodernists.

I am going to finish with a Nietzsche quote because Nietzsche is surprisingly postmodern. This dialectical move is at the heart of a good deconstruction:
>6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.

By proving things like there is no "true world" postmodernists are not advocating that all things arbitrary. What they are saying is that we must reevaluate what we mean by "true world" since certain conceptions of the "true world" have intractable problems. They are trying to show how we actually use language, what we could possibly mean.

excellent !

Se lie parfaitement avec ce livre un peu vieux mais n'a jamais été autant d'actualité.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NXG4BP8/