Mr. Brown

I feel, it is impossible to make justice to your qualified and inspiring reply in the framework of such forum. Therefore, I look eagerly foreward to your paper.

After your clarification, most of your ideas seem not so far distant from mine. Devil, as usually, lies in the detail. In order to leave you with a short feedback, I will only mention two questions that stroke my mind when reading your comment.

Action and Value
True to the topic of this forum (philosophy of action), action is probably the most challenging point to the reader here. My question is why you separate action from values when you refer to the contreversies in historicism (and Methodenstreit?) and defend "moral values" over "human action". Trained myself in Austrian School, I consider action itself as the expression of a value statement which, in my opinion, is implicit in the concept of intention.

Materialism and Time
Honestly, I doubt that we can have clear ideas of materialism and material without, at least silently, making assumptions on time and the non-material, i.e. mind. I know it is an extended praxis in modern philosophy to search for solutions that avoid apparently unsolvable problems. Language philosophy tries to avoid metaphysics alltogether. The cost of this is that we obscure our metaphysical position, which makes the result not more true or clearer.

Time seems to be the point where we two most oppose our ideas.

Some arguments on time...

A) How can we make "probability distributions of the present"?

Present is immanent. as soon as we abstract it and deduce probabilities we are speaking of the past, aren't we?

B) Further, do I understand you right, that the future is an extrapolation of a reified past in a probabilistic way?

Speaking of probability, we have to distinguish between class and case probability. Class probability is used in natural science (e.g. predicting weather from a set of data of past occurencies) and also in many schools of sociology (e.g. prediction of elections). In the field history and economics (especially concerning leadership and business strategies) the true interest lies in the explanatory power of case probability and the human ability to imagine a future beyond predictions of class probability (as Mehmet II when he decided in 1453 to transport warships overland and conquered Constantinople!)

C) What do you think about my idea, that there is always an element of creativity in the construction of both future and present Reification of the past, as I think, means that the past is not only a simple reconstrutction of deductions from material objects but also a creative actualization of it, always charged with values.

A framework for discussion
I'm not so familiar with Nagarjuna, who, as far as I know, belongs to the school fo Mahayana Buddhism close to Platonian ideas of time. I feel that in Asian philosophy Theravada Buddhism, or the Chinese Huayan School (actually belonging to Mahayana) or Bushido are much closer to my philosophy. We find similar ideas in European thinking by Heraclitus and in more recent time by Hegel and also Bergson.

Bergson seems to be a common denominator of our two lines of thinking. I will try to find answer from within his theory in order support my arguments, this may make discussions easier.

I hope to read your paper soon and will try to honor it with more concluding statemetns.

Looking forward to your thoughts.
Best regards.
Tabea Hirzel