Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Very much like the Pre-Socratic philosophical works, the basic texts of the Cārvāka system are lost. Only a few fragments — passages of varying length — have come down to us. Even then all of them are not genuine, as they seem to offer contrary points of view. Earlier scholars from H. T.…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya (a) Did the Carvakas Refuse to Admit Inference? In the Indian philosophical context, besides the issues of rebirth, afterlife and otherworld, the instruments of cognition (prammana) are considered to be of seminal importance. The Carvakas are generally branded as a philosophical school that accepted perception as the only means of knowledge. But there…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya What is Materialism? Before proceeding to details, it is necessary to understand what, in the philosophical context, materialism stands for. George Stack has recently defined materialism as follows: Materialism is a set of theories which holds that all entities and processes are composed of—or are reducible to—matter, material forces or physical processes. All…
Giuseppe Tucci It will seem strange enough that among the multiplicity of Indian philosophical schools and systems I have chosen as the subject of my paper the Carvaka – or Lokayatamata – which as a particular school has disappeared long ago from India, and which was so greatly looked down upon that according to Brahminical…
Erich Frauwallner (December 28, 1898 – January 5, 1974) It is advantageous to join the nature-philosophical schools with the description of Materialism, as the latter stands nearer to them than all other schools. By the way the Indians themselves, as a rule, speak not of Materialism but they characterize its adherents usually as deniers or…
Sita K Nambiar We earlier posted certain sections of Krsna Misra’s 11th century allegorical drama, Prabodhacandrodya, in which the character Cārvāka makes an appearance. Though Prabodhacandrodaya does caricature Carvaka/Lokayta philosophy, the play is an important source of our present day knowledge about materialist philosophy in ancient India. We now reproduce parts of the critical introduction…
Almost all of what we know today about Cārvāka/Lokāyata philosophy is from secondary sources – most of which are quoted by opponents of the philosophy in order to refute or even ridicule its arguments. Not surprisingly, there was a tendency in these works to caricature the philosophical stance of these ancient Indian materialists. Yet, these…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The Concise Oxford Dictionary (on CD-Rom, 11th ed. 2004) defines rationalism as “the practice or principle of basing opinions and actions on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response.” This is not the only meaning of the word. In philosophy the same term suggests “the theory that reason rather…
V. Brodov The founder of the Samkhya1 philosophical system and the author of the Samkhya-sutra was, as is generally believed, Kapila (c. 6th-5th centuries B. C.). The Samkhya-sutra was lost, so that we have to use later sources – Isvarakrishna Samkhya Karika (3rd-4th centuries C. E.), Vacaspati Misra’s Samkhya Tattva Kaumudi (9th century), and others.…
<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} span.st {mso-style-name:st;} span.transformat {mso-style-name:transformat;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The notes propose to throw light on certain aspects of materialism in ancient India and point…