Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The history of materialist thought in India is quite old, going back at least to the times of the Buddha. But its latest form, known as the Cārvāka/Lokāyata, flourished only in or around the eighth century CE. It was a living system till the twelfth century. Thereafter it seems to have vanished into…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya In recent times all over the world there has been a revival of religious fundamentalism, bigotry and intolerance. In fact, the forces that sustain terrorism today are basically religious. Add to this the current crusade against reason that has been launched by some postmodernist thinkers. Reason is made to stand on the dock.…
G. Ramakrishna A prolific author and a versatile researcher, Professor Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya is among those who gave a qualitative turn to the methods and content of research in more disciplines than one. Essentially a student of Philosophy – Indian and Western – he has authored quite a few authentic works in the area of…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The Lion of Upsetting of all Principles (Tattvopaplava-siṃha) by Jayarāśibhaṭṭa has been claimed by some scholars to be the only surviving Cārvāka work. Others have challenged this view.i Since there is no external evidence to settle the question, the debate continues solely on the basis of internal evidence and intrinsic probability. No near-unanimous…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya a. Did the Carvakas Refuse to Admit Inference? In the Indian philosophical context, besides the issues of rebirth, after-life and other-world, the instruments of cognition (pramana) are considered to be of seminal importance. The Carvaka/Lokayata is generally branded as a philosophical school which accepted perception as the only means of knowledge. But there…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya What is Materialism? 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, matterial forces or physical processes. All events…
Bina Gupta A careful examination of the Cārvāka School of ancient Indian materialism reveals a number of interesting parallels to a relatively modern school of western thought, the type of skepticism first formulated by David Hume, to mention only one example. The purpose of this paper is to examine and contrast the respective epistemologies which…
An Annotated Conversation with Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Krishna Del Toso It was the 2009 when by chance I ran into a book just issued, whose author I already knew by name and reputation, since few years before – while I was studying the chapter devoted to the exposition of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata philosophy in Sayāṇa-Mādhava’s Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha –…
G Ramakrishna The murky record of idealism as a vicious weapon on the one hand and philosophical obscurantism on the other has a shining contrast in materialism. Once again the historical limitations of the ancient Indian materialist philosophers cannot be overlooked. The rudiments of materialism are quite clear in many anti-idealist schools of though and…
G Ramakrishna A total rejection of idealism means the acceptance of a secular, rational and scientific approach, while idealism has religion-orientation, faith in the scriptures, and superstitions in most of its major forms, for its accessories (p 234). The other major contribution of the anti-idealist schools of thought consists of the defence of practice as…