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Thread: Refutation of Charvaka

  1. #21
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    Re: Refutation of Charvaka

    Quote Originally Posted by sarabhanga View Post
    CARVAKA

    The following passage from the “Dighanikaya” exemplifies the neglected thought of the entirely materialist Carvaka Philosophy:

    “Man is formed of the four elements.

    When he dies, earth returns to the aggregate of earth, water to water, fire to fire, and air to air, while his senses vanish into space.

    Four men with the bier take up the corpse: they gossip as far as the burning-ground, where his bones turn the color of a dove’s wing and his sacrifices end in ashes.

    They are fools who preach alms-giving, and those who maintain the existence of immaterial categories speak vain and lying nonsense.

    When the body dies, both fool and wise alike are cut off and perish.

    They do not survive after death.”



    Carvaka is certainly an Indian (and thus Hindu) philosophy, but it CANNOT be considered as one of the paths of Sanatana Dharma!


    The last three claims in that description of Charvaka are so sad. However, it is true that everyone has their path in life--if this is what one has found they have a karmic connection to, i wish them the best! Still i have to agree this couldn't be considered Sanatana Dharma.

  2. #22

    Re: Refutation of Charvaka

    Hmm, but they mention the dead person turns into fire, water, air, and earth...oh...but they don't survive...? right.

    lol


    I really don't care if people believe in god or not....the great mystery or whatever is way too profound to can in any one religion humans can come up with.

    Logic has its place but honestly it has to be used properly to be of any use....this kind of irritated antagonistic atheist shoving their opinions under everyone else's nose is just, well, stupid.

    Ok so we all turn into elements when we die, big deal! Tea? I'm not sure this line of thinking has any purpose besides mental masturbation? We have plenty of scientific evidence to prove that a whole lot of strange unseen phenomenon exists...we don't yet have proof that bodies turn into fire
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  3. #23
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    Re: Refutation of Charvaka

    While other schools accepted as an element, Carvaks rejected it as NOT PERCEPTIBLE. They accepted earth, fire, water and air as elements.

    They accepted perception as the only source of knowledge and rejected inference, testimony etc.

  4. #24
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    Re: Refutation of Charvaka

    Carvaka is indeed an internally inconsistent philosophy. They reject inference as a means of knowledge and only accept perception. If they are asked why perception is the only means of knowledge, they would obviously have to use logical statements to back their statements up. Thus they have to resort to inference as a means of validating their perception.

    However, a Caravakin would retort that they are not using inference to discover any new knowledge, but only to make existing sensory knowledge sensible e.g, there is fire on the mountain, because there is smoke on the mountain. Thus they would reject reasoning where one derives something imperceptible from the perceptible e.g., there must be an ultimate material cause for all matter, because all effects pre-exist in a cause; there must be atoms, because else there would be an infinite regress; gravity must exist to explain the cause of objects falling.

    Modern science makes exactly the same claim that it is only uses inference only to describe existing perceptible data. However, in practice the scientific method is a mixture of both perception and inference. In fact there is a lot of inference used in science to conclude the existence of imperceptible things(atoms, gravity, black holes, dark energy etc) Thus science is not very different from other systems of metaphysics(Nyaya, Samkhya) because they too use a mixture of perception and inference to conclude imperceptible entities.

    As soon as a purely empirical epistemology like Carvaka and modern science start to use inference in any way, then they are forced to accept the existence of imperceptible things predicated by perceptible things. In which case they are doing metaphysics and then it is fair game to compare it to any other metaphysics.

  5. #25
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    Re: Refutation of Charvaka

    Much of what we know as Charvaka philosophy is derived by representations by the Purvapaksha [Advaita/Dvaita/Jain/Buddhist all of whom attempted to refute the Charvaka]. So, we do not know if truly the Charvaka practised the form of extreme materialism that others accuse him of. I think the actual Charvaka position may have been somewhat more lenient than the position imputed to him by others.

  6. #26

    Re: Refutation of Charvaka

    Quote Originally Posted by kamala View Post
    So do Charvaka people beleive that the gods even exist?
    The label Carvaka has been loosely applied to people who were mostly atheists or at the least, agnosts. There is no evidence that they organized themselves into a formal group or school.

    Based on this, the answer to your question would be No.

    My website http://lokayata.info contains details.
    Last edited by shiv.somashekhar; 15 February 2012 at 06:27 PM.

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