Charvaka Philosophy Research Paper
Ghost, are they real? What is real? A child trembling in the dark may be fearful because he believes that reality is more than the hard material objects around him. Reality for him also includes an unseen spiritual realm. You may defend yourself against these fears by insisting that such a realm cannot be a part of reality. Reality consists only of the hard, enduring objects around you that can be seen, heard, touched, and smelled. But what grounds do you have for this belief? In fact, many intelligent and thoughtful people have concluded that reality includes more than material objects. And many people have suspected that spirits are very real. What reasons can you give for saying that they are wrong? Don’t virtually all religions declare
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that reality is more than the material world around us? Can a person even claim to be religious without believing that there is more to reality than the material world around us? Doesn’t God or “the gods” have to constitute a kind of reality that is totally different from material reality? But it isn’t just spirits and gods that raise troubling metaphysical questions about what we admit to be real. For example, what are we to say about most of the things for which people are willing to live and die? Consider justice, or goodness, or liberty, or truth, or beauty, or love. Are these material? Can they be seen, touched, smelled, or heard? Do they have a size, a shape, or even a place? Are these real? Haven’t millions of people died for these ideals? Don’t millions of people devote their entire lives to the pursuit of ideals such as these? Doesn’t such devotion imply that they are real? Perhaps to a practical person these notions seem too soft-minded to be real. So, consider some tougher notions. Economists regularly discuss “inflationary pressures” and the “forces” of supply and demand. Has anyone ever heard, seen, or physically felt these pressures and forces? Yet surely they are real; indeed, their reality creates the wealth of the rich and the impoverishment of the poor. But in what sense are these pressures and forces real? What does it mean to say that these are real? And if these unseen entities are real, then why can’t spirits be admitted into the realm of reality? Or consider the physicist’s force fields, electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and other subatomic particles; the mathematician’s numbers, formulas, roots, and equations; and the astronomer’s laws, curved spaces, black holes, and compressed or stretched intervals of time. Do we admit these odd entities into our notion of “reality”? Yet none of these are like the hard, visible, colored objects that make up our material world. What, then, is reality? What does it include? These questions are puzzling. But are they important? Let’s see. Think about what you imply when you say that something is not part of reality. For example, consider what you imply when you tell your little brother that “spirits aren’t real.” Isn’t the point of saying this to convince him that he should pay no attention to so-called spirits? Aren’t you telling him that spirits can exert no causal influence on him? That they cannot act on him or on anything else and so can neither hurt nor help him? Are you saying that they have no importance, no power, no actuality, no significance? They should be disregarded, paid no attention, dismissed? If these are some of the implications of saying something is unreal, then the implications of saying something is part of reality are great indeed. For in saying that something is part of reality, are we not saying that it has importance, significance, actuality, power? Are we not saying that it is something that should not be dismissed, something that can make a difference to our lives, something to which we need to be attentive? As the philosopher Robert Nozick has said, to say something is real is to say it has “value, meaning, importance, and weight.’’ To determine what is real, human rely solely on few senses available physiologically the 5 senses include vision, smell, taste, hearing and touch. Beside that, different religion having different rely, First of all, The Ghost Festival, also known as the Hungry Ghost Festival, is a traditional Chinese festival and holiday celebrated by Chinese in many countries. According to the Chinese calendar, the Ghost Festival is on the 15th night of the seventh lunar month (14th in southern China). In Chinese tradition, the fifteenth day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar is called Ghost Day and the seventh month in general is regarded as the Ghost Month, in which ghosts and spirits, including those of the deceased ancestors, come out from the lower realm. Distinct from both the Qingming Festival and Chung Yeung Festival in which living descendants pay homage to their deceased ancestors, on Ghost Day, people believe that spirit will come back to visit the living. Beside that, Chinese believe that spirit having the different smell and some of the Chinese may seem ghosts. On the fifteenth day the realms of Heaven and Hell and the realm of the living are open and both Taoists and Buddhists would perform rituals to transmute and absolve the sufferings of the deceased. Intrinsic to the Ghost Month is ancestor worship, where traditionally the filial piety of descendants extends to their ancestors even after their deaths. Activities during the month would include preparing ritualistic food offerings, burning incense, and burning joss paper, a papier- macheé form of material items such as clothes, gold and other fine goods for the visiting spirits of the ancestors. Elaborate meals would be served with empty seats for each of the deceased in the family treating the deceased as if they are still living. Ancestor worship is what distinguishes Qingming Festival from Ghost Festival because the latter includes paying respects to all deceased, including the same and younger generations, while the former only includes older generations. Other festivities may include, buying and releasing miniature paper boats and lanterns on water, which signifies giving directions to the lost ghosts and spirits of the ancestors and other deities. Furthermore, the “Charvaka” philosophers of India, ridiculed the spiritualism of their religious countrymen.
The Charvaka philosophers were also known as “Lokyata,” which means “those who go the worldly way” because of their view that we should seek our happiness in this material world and its physical pleasures, and turn away from religion and its delusions. The views of the Charvaka philosophers were based on the idea that there is only one valid source of knowledge about the world around us: sense perception. Other possible sources of knowledge, such as inductive or deductive reasoning, they argued, are invalid. Inductive reasoning is generalizing about what we observe. For example, after observing many cases of smoke accompanied by fire, we might generalize that “where there’s smoke, there’s always fire.” The problem with such inductive reasoning, they argued, is that generalizations always go beyond what we can observe. Deductive reasoning is also unreliable because deductive reasoning always appeals to general statements to reach its logical conclusions, and it ultimately depends on the generalizations that inductive reasoning produces. So, deductive reasoning can be no more reliable than the inductive reasoning on which it is based. Therefore, all reasoning with inductive or deductive, about what the world around us is like is unreliable. Our only reliable source of knowledge about the world, then, is what we can immediately see, hear, touch, smell, or taste with our
senses. Once the Charvaka philosophers had established that we can know only what we can perceive with our senses, it was easy for them to argue for materialism. Because all we know is what we can perceive with our senses, and because whatever we perceive with our senses is physical and material, it follows that all we can know is the material or physical world around us. Moreover, they argued, if we cannot know something, it is wrong to say it exists. Any “things” we cannot perceive with our senses such as souls, god, or any other spiritual “realities” which cannot be said to exist at all. Beyond the material world there is nothing. There is no god, so religious worship is a pointless waste and priests are charlatans. There is no soul that leaves the body after death, no heavenly rewards, no punishments of hell, no afterlife at all. Human life begins in this world and ends in this world, so people should try to get as much of the bodily pleasures of this life as they can, the Charvakas urged. The Greek philosopher Democritus also believed that reality could be explained in terms of matter. The smallest pieces of matter he called atoms; he described them as solid, indivisible, indestructible, eternal, and uncreated. Atoms were not qualitatively distinguishable from one another, and they constantly moved through space, where they combined to form the recognizable physical objects of the universe. According to Democritus, the universe consisted of atoms and empty space. He believed that even the soul, which he equated with reason, consisted of atoms. In this atomic universe, “all things happen by virtue of necessity, the vortex being the cause of the creation of all things.” But Democritus’s theory never became popular because people soon became disenchanted with philosophers’ many attempts to explain the cosmos. Their interest turned to more personal concerns, such as how to lead a good and happy life. This interest was sparked by later Greek philosophers. Although their interests reached much further than such questions, the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle saw moral virtue as the road to a good and happy life. The rise of Christianity fanned this interest in personal moral conduct, which predominated throughout the Middle Ages. In particular, the idea of an afterlife and the soul, which included the concept of personal immortality, gave the view of reality a distinctly nonmaterial bias. In the seventeenth century, however, a growing interest in the world and the rise of scientific method and scientific discovery turned minds once again to materialism. Awakened by the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, people watched science cultivate a full-blown materialism. Committed to the belief that the world could be quantified by scientists, several philosophers made the materialistic claim that all is matter.
that reality is more than the material world around us? Can a person even claim to be religious without believing that there is more to reality than the material world around us? Doesn’t God or “the gods” have to constitute a kind of reality that is totally different from material reality? But it isn’t just spirits and gods that raise troubling metaphysical questions about what we admit to be real. For example, what are we to say about most of the things for which people are willing to live and die? Consider justice, or goodness, or liberty, or truth, or beauty, or love. Are these material? Can they be seen, touched, smelled, or heard? Do they have a size, a shape, or even a place? Are these real? Haven’t millions of people died for these ideals? Don’t millions of people devote their entire lives to the pursuit of ideals such as these? Doesn’t such devotion imply that they are real? Perhaps to a practical person these notions seem too soft-minded to be real. So, consider some tougher notions. Economists regularly discuss “inflationary pressures” and the “forces” of supply and demand. Has anyone ever heard, seen, or physically felt these pressures and forces? Yet surely they are real; indeed, their reality creates the wealth of the rich and the impoverishment of the poor. But in what sense are these pressures and forces real? What does it mean to say that these are real? And if these unseen entities are real, then why can’t spirits be admitted into the realm of reality? Or consider the physicist’s force fields, electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and other subatomic particles; the mathematician’s numbers, formulas, roots, and equations; and the astronomer’s laws, curved spaces, black holes, and compressed or stretched intervals of time. Do we admit these odd entities into our notion of “reality”? Yet none of these are like the hard, visible, colored objects that make up our material world. What, then, is reality? What does it include? These questions are puzzling. But are they important? Let’s see. Think about what you imply when you say that something is not part of reality. For example, consider what you imply when you tell your little brother that “spirits aren’t real.” Isn’t the point of saying this to convince him that he should pay no attention to so-called spirits? Aren’t you telling him that spirits can exert no causal influence on him? That they cannot act on him or on anything else and so can neither hurt nor help him? Are you saying that they have no importance, no power, no actuality, no significance? They should be disregarded, paid no attention, dismissed? If these are some of the implications of saying something is unreal, then the implications of saying something is part of reality are great indeed. For in saying that something is part of reality, are we not saying that it has importance, significance, actuality, power? Are we not saying that it is something that should not be dismissed, something that can make a difference to our lives, something to which we need to be attentive? As the philosopher Robert Nozick has said, to say something is real is to say it has “value, meaning, importance, and weight.’’ To determine what is real, human rely solely on few senses available physiologically the 5 senses include vision, smell, taste, hearing and touch. Beside that, different religion having different rely, First of all, The Ghost Festival, also known as the Hungry Ghost Festival, is a traditional Chinese festival and holiday celebrated by Chinese in many countries. According to the Chinese calendar, the Ghost Festival is on the 15th night of the seventh lunar month (14th in southern China). In Chinese tradition, the fifteenth day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar is called Ghost Day and the seventh month in general is regarded as the Ghost Month, in which ghosts and spirits, including those of the deceased ancestors, come out from the lower realm. Distinct from both the Qingming Festival and Chung Yeung Festival in which living descendants pay homage to their deceased ancestors, on Ghost Day, people believe that spirit will come back to visit the living. Beside that, Chinese believe that spirit having the different smell and some of the Chinese may seem ghosts. On the fifteenth day the realms of Heaven and Hell and the realm of the living are open and both Taoists and Buddhists would perform rituals to transmute and absolve the sufferings of the deceased. Intrinsic to the Ghost Month is ancestor worship, where traditionally the filial piety of descendants extends to their ancestors even after their deaths. Activities during the month would include preparing ritualistic food offerings, burning incense, and burning joss paper, a papier- macheé form of material items such as clothes, gold and other fine goods for the visiting spirits of the ancestors. Elaborate meals would be served with empty seats for each of the deceased in the family treating the deceased as if they are still living. Ancestor worship is what distinguishes Qingming Festival from Ghost Festival because the latter includes paying respects to all deceased, including the same and younger generations, while the former only includes older generations. Other festivities may include, buying and releasing miniature paper boats and lanterns on water, which signifies giving directions to the lost ghosts and spirits of the ancestors and other deities. Furthermore, the “Charvaka” philosophers of India, ridiculed the spiritualism of their religious countrymen.
The Charvaka philosophers were also known as “Lokyata,” which means “those who go the worldly way” because of their view that we should seek our happiness in this material world and its physical pleasures, and turn away from religion and its delusions. The views of the Charvaka philosophers were based on the idea that there is only one valid source of knowledge about the world around us: sense perception. Other possible sources of knowledge, such as inductive or deductive reasoning, they argued, are invalid. Inductive reasoning is generalizing about what we observe. For example, after observing many cases of smoke accompanied by fire, we might generalize that “where there’s smoke, there’s always fire.” The problem with such inductive reasoning, they argued, is that generalizations always go beyond what we can observe. Deductive reasoning is also unreliable because deductive reasoning always appeals to general statements to reach its logical conclusions, and it ultimately depends on the generalizations that inductive reasoning produces. So, deductive reasoning can be no more reliable than the inductive reasoning on which it is based. Therefore, all reasoning with inductive or deductive, about what the world around us is like is unreliable. Our only reliable source of knowledge about the world, then, is what we can immediately see, hear, touch, smell, or taste with our
senses. Once the Charvaka philosophers had established that we can know only what we can perceive with our senses, it was easy for them to argue for materialism. Because all we know is what we can perceive with our senses, and because whatever we perceive with our senses is physical and material, it follows that all we can know is the material or physical world around us. Moreover, they argued, if we cannot know something, it is wrong to say it exists. Any “things” we cannot perceive with our senses such as souls, god, or any other spiritual “realities” which cannot be said to exist at all. Beyond the material world there is nothing. There is no god, so religious worship is a pointless waste and priests are charlatans. There is no soul that leaves the body after death, no heavenly rewards, no punishments of hell, no afterlife at all. Human life begins in this world and ends in this world, so people should try to get as much of the bodily pleasures of this life as they can, the Charvakas urged. The Greek philosopher Democritus also believed that reality could be explained in terms of matter. The smallest pieces of matter he called atoms; he described them as solid, indivisible, indestructible, eternal, and uncreated. Atoms were not qualitatively distinguishable from one another, and they constantly moved through space, where they combined to form the recognizable physical objects of the universe. According to Democritus, the universe consisted of atoms and empty space. He believed that even the soul, which he equated with reason, consisted of atoms. In this atomic universe, “all things happen by virtue of necessity, the vortex being the cause of the creation of all things.” But Democritus’s theory never became popular because people soon became disenchanted with philosophers’ many attempts to explain the cosmos. Their interest turned to more personal concerns, such as how to lead a good and happy life. This interest was sparked by later Greek philosophers. Although their interests reached much further than such questions, the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle saw moral virtue as the road to a good and happy life. The rise of Christianity fanned this interest in personal moral conduct, which predominated throughout the Middle Ages. In particular, the idea of an afterlife and the soul, which included the concept of personal immortality, gave the view of reality a distinctly nonmaterial bias. In the seventeenth century, however, a growing interest in the world and the rise of scientific method and scientific discovery turned minds once again to materialism. Awakened by the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, people watched science cultivate a full-blown materialism. Committed to the belief that the world could be quantified by scientists, several philosophers made the materialistic claim that all is matter.