Category Archives: Cārvāka-Lokāyata

Śabda and the sciences

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Faith, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Sāṃkhya-Yoga

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One of the key debates in Indian philosophy is what counts as a pramāṇa: an instrument of knowledge, a “reliable warrant”, a means of knowledge reliable enough that one can be reasonably confident to take its conclusions as true. What counts as a pramāṇa? Many Indian philosophers will provide a numbered list of them.

In the empiricist tradition that remains popular in the West, boosted by the discoveries of natural science, only experience is admitted as a pramāṇa: to a full-blown empiricist, nothing counts as knowledge if it doesn’t ultimately have its roots in experience, based in some sort of direct perception. (Ken Wilber’s thought has come to take this position more and more over the years, to its detriment.) The debate over pramāṇas in modern Western philosophy is often framed as one between empiricism and rationalism. That is, where empiricists admit only experience as a pramāṇa, rationalists also allow reasoning an independent validity: some things can be rationally known a priori, independently of sense experience.

Some Indian philosophers have agreed with these views. Continue reading →

The classical opposition

08 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Confucianism, East Asia, Metaphilosophy, Sophists, South Asia

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In each of the three great classical traditions of philosophy – the West, South Asia and East Asia (or Greece, India and China) – there appears early on a school of thought that is taken as that tradition’s target of attack. This school dies out after a few hundred years or so, so that in modern times we know them above all as the object of the mainstream tradition’s attacks. And yet, to the extent that we can date the philosophy in this period, the philosophical reflection arising before this school tends to be far less sophisticated than that coming after.

The three schools in question are the Sophists in Greece, the Cārvāka or Lokāyata in India, and the Mohists in China. They are of crucial importance to any cross-cultural philosopher, because by running against the grain of the later tradition they break most of our stereotypes about that culture’s philosophy as a whole. In most general attempts to characterize the nature of Indian philosophy, for example, the words “except the Cārvākas” come up a lot. Continue reading →

Of the plausibility or reliability of “common sense”

17 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", South Asia, Truth

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This week, another foray into the debate over “common sense.” Apologies in advance to those readers who are not interested in this particular topic, or who will find this post’s precision rough going. Common-sense advocate Thill has been by far this blog’s most prolific commenter, and I think advancing the debates in the comments requires taking his views on directly and systematically. Moreover, I think the topic is an important one in its own right. The claims made by Thill, Jabali108, Neocarvaka and Ramachandra1008 in their comments, if they were true, would rule out the vast majority of South Asian philosophical thought (and a great more besides): probably all the philosophy originating in the subcontinent except for the shadowy Cārvāka-Lokāyata school of thought. Only the Cārvākas can be thought to completely exclude “religious” ideas from their worldview; but there is little if anything left to be learned from this school now, since all we have from them is the scantest of fragments. (The only surviving complete text attributed to a Cārvāka is Jayarāśi’s Tattvopaplavasiṃha, which these commenters have already dismissed as not really a Cārvāka text.) If South Asian thought is worth bothering with at all, then we’ll need to defend those conceptions of the world that are in some respects at odds with various elements of “common sense” – which, according to Thill, excludes all “religion.” Continue reading →

Skepticism in two directions

29 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Mahāyāna, Prejudices and "Intuitions", South Asia

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I attended a great panel yesterday at the Eastern APA. Two of the presentations addressed each other directly on a topic I’ve discussed before: skepticism in Indian thought. The presenters, Ethan Mills and Laura Guererro of the University of New Mexico, had clearly been engaged in a longstanding debate with each other on the subject beforehand, which I think helped sharpen their thoughts nicely for the talk.

Mills presented on Jayarāśi, whose Tattvopaplavasiṃha (“The Lion that Afflicts Categories”) is the only extant full text attributed to a member of the Cārvāka-Lokāyata, the atheist and materialist school of ancient Indian thought. But Jayarāśi takes the Cārvāka school’s thought much further than it is usually thought to go. Whereas this materialist school is normally understood to merely deny the existence of gods and karma, Jayarāśi denies the existence of pretty much everything. Previous Cārvākas were said to believe that the world was made up entirely of the four elements; Jayarāśi says, “Even the view of world as elements is not well established. How much less are all the others?” He is, in short, a skeptic. Continue reading →

The three basic ways of life

20 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by in Aesthetics, Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Christianity, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Pleasure, Roman Catholicism, South Asia, Vedānta, Work

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One reason I turn back to premodern philosophies so much is that they often show us questions larger than those generally asked in philosophy today. Especially important among these: “what kind of life should I live?” What sorts of major life decisions should I make? It still surprises me how rarely academic philosophers concern themselves with these questions, when we spend so much time teaching people in their late teens and early twenties – for whom these questions are in the foreground.

Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy: Continue reading →