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Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on why it was so impactful?

I think everdrive captures it well: the ancient text most of us are exposed to in childhood is the bible (or other religious texts). I forgave a lot, because I just imagined that people were like that back then: gullible, ignorant, lacking in a critical approach. When you read Herodotus, it is like sitting in a room with a modern fabulous story teller. He is thoughtful, critical, sarcastic, skeptical and amusing. In short, a thoroughly modern person. The stories themselves are of course compelling too - the epic struggles between Greece and Persia. But it is the sense of intelligence that comes through. As I said, for me, life altering.

For me the best story was finding out that already back then it was common to do "Erasmus", Greek medicine students going to Egipt to practice with what were the best known doctors in the field for a couple of years.

Also in similar vein there is a letter from a known Roman writer, cannot remember the name now, complaining how his son is wasting his money in student parties in Athens instead of taking care to finish his degree.

Some things haven't changed that much in a couple of thousand years. :)

It was common, in many periods of history, for young and wealthy men to go on travels for purposes of education (e.g. the Grand Tour of 17th century aristocrats). Interestingly enough, one of the key principles of the development of early medieval universities was free and unmolested travel of scholars between institutions, independent of civil or religious authorities. This means both teachers and students travelled between universities to teach / find better teachers, respectively.

Off-topic: the phrase "do Erasmus" is unmistakable. I see you're either Portuguese or Spanish ;)

Portuguese. :)

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast has a whole series on the Persian empire (King’s of King’s) that draws heavily from Herodotus. It gets quite meta in places with a lot of time dedicated to Herodotus and his storytelling style, and he ends up as one of the more fascinating characters in the story itself. Dan likens him to a modern day screenwriter with a sense for drama and emotion that previous historians lacked and that reading Herodotus vs earlier records is in some ways like the difference between the black and white silent film era and modern cinema.

I've just recently discovered other people in the other parts of the world who were also completely not gullible also around 2500 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajita_Kesakambali

"Fools and wise alike, on the dissolution of the body, are cut off, annihilated, and after death they are not."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka

"Charvakas denied metaphysical concepts like reincarnation, an extracorporeal soul, the efficacy of religious rites, other worlds (heaven and hell), fate and accumulation of merit or demerit through the performance of certain actions.[40] Charvakas also rejected the use of supernatural causes to describe natural phenomena. To them all natural phenomena was produced spontaneously from the inherent nature of things."

I think this example is sort-of silly. It’s basically “there existed in the past people who denied religious beliefs which I also deny therefore they were not completely gullible.” But this argument basically requires one to assume that (a) society was progressing towards the denying of these religious beliefs and (b) that these people were part of the steps of that progress. It all feels very Whiggish.

One can imagine eg a modern day Christian looking back to some roman converting to Christianity and saying that clearly not all Romans were completely gullible.

I do not claim that there is nothing interesting in the history here but I do claim that it isn’t at all about gullibility.

> this argument basically requires one to assume that (a) society was progressing towards the denying of these religious beliefs

No. I've never said that and I don't believe in that.

My thesis it: there were the thinkers around 2500 years ago, on some very distant places, that came to the basis that is the actual basis of the modern science, fruits of which we all enjoy.

The actual basis of the science is simple: to investigate the world, one must simply posit that the scientific explanation for any observation is not any other-worldy miracle. As soon as one bases his explanation on that, anything is possible, and automatically is out of the science.

Moreover, the sciences which have to posit that aren't only physics or biology. Even history has to posit that: the basic premise of historic examination of any historic even is that there were no deities doing miracles, but the stories claiming miracles invented by humans.

So one can either do history scientifically, or simply be religious, but he can't get the points in science from doing later. His work will then, correctly, be dismissed.

Note, we started the discussion here by talking about Herodotus, the father of history. Not the father of religion.

For a historian doing history, every religious story involving miracles is just a myth, no matter which religion tells it. Every (non theological) university book can't be made otherwise.

And the same approach was of course true for the physicists doing physics: Newton could believe in deities as much a he wanted, he didn't explain the movements of planets with angels flipping wings but by demonstrating the calculations based on the rules of gravitation.

(Btw word to the wise, Most Wikipedia articles dealing with Indian philosophy including the ones you cited are crap.)

Anyway...

Very little is actually known about the Charvakas except through quotes by their opponents but we can definitely conclude they were skeptics alright but hardly scientific or even rationalist. They only believed valid knowledge only comes from perception by the five senses so even inference was opposed which makes logic impossible.

There is also a recent theory which I’m not sure I buy but sounds interesting that far from being radically anti-religious, the Charvakas were actually the remnant of the most conservative strains of thought.

The Vedic religion c. 500 BC mostly involved sacrificial rituals of greater or lesser complexity performed by a man and his wife. The goal of those rituals was worldly power and wealth. They were addressed to Gods who were either personifications of natural phenomena or embodiments of human archetypes. Such metaphysics as there was involved creating a new body for the deceased so he could enjoy life in heaven. (We can still see remnants of this in the Hindu funeral rites or shraddha in which reincarnation is only rather awkwardly bolted on.) This heaven was beyond the everyday world but otherwise exactly the same. One could even physically travel there.

Around 500BC or so there was cultural upheaval and many new ideas arose. In the Upanishads, Buddhism, Jainism and other sects that no longer survive, a new paradigm arose that emphasized enlightened knowledge over ritual action, the ascetic monk over the married householder, and liberation from constant reincarnation over one future life in Heaven. Heaven (and the new concept of Hell) were also expanded into multiple worlds inhabited by all kinds of supernatural creatures.

If we examine the extent Charvaka fragments, it is mainly these new-fangled ideas that they mock. Furthermore all the known Charvaka authors are Brahmanas some of them well-versed in traditional learning. One of them even quotes the Vedas to support his views. This is because they were actually representatives of the old guard or so the theory goes. Like I said I’m not sure if I buy it but there it is.

This is an intriguing theory that I haven't come across before. Do you have any book recommendations for learning more about the evolution of Indian philosophy?

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