The shape of ancient thought
Spanning thirty years of intensive research, this book proves what many scholars could not explain: that today’s Western world must be considered the product of both Greek and Indian thought—Western and Eastern philosophies. Thomas McEvilley explores how trade, imperialism, and migration currents allowed cultural philosophies to intermingle freely throughout India, Egypt, Greece, and the ancient Near East. This groundbreaking reference will stir relentless debate among philosophers, art historians, and students.
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5recommend
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2015–2023years
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What Hacker News says
- It's one of my favorite topics too, I just love the imaginative mixture of ancient Greek and Indian cultures.
Some tasty bits:
Ancient Greece–Ancient India relations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece%E2%80%93Ancient...
_Shape of Ancient Thought: Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies_ by Thomas McEvilley - https://archive.org/details/shapeofancientthoughtstudiesingr...
- The Planiverse: Computer contact with a two-dimensional world - by A.K. Dewdney
> A mind-bending, paradigm shifting visit with Yedred, a denizen of the 2 dimensional Universe. It is written so that the physics comes through very easily for those without science training. A university student discovers that this being Yendred is communicating with him through his computer. There begins a lively dialog as both the 2D Yendred and the 3D author struggle to explain and understand each others worlds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planiverse
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The Glass Bead Game - by Hermann Hesse
> The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date centuries in the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around the start of the 25th century.
> The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for the life of the mind.. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools, and to cultivate and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school in Castalia known as Waldzell.
> The rules of the game are only alluded to — they are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. The game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game
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The World as Will and Representation - by Arthur Schopenhauer
> The phrase "Tat Tvam Asi" ('thou art that'), one of the Mahāvākyas of the Upanishads, displayed on an Indian temple. Schopenhauer uses this Sanskrit phrase to express a foundational tenet of his ethics: 'the will is the in-itself of every appearance, and as such is itself free from the form of appearance, and thus from all multiplicity'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Represen...
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The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies - by Thomas McEvilley
> Spanning thirty years of intensive research, this book proves what many scholars could not explain: that today’s Western world must be considered the product of both Greek and Indian thought — Western and Eastern philosophies.
> Thomas McEvilley explores how trade, imperialism, and migration currents allowed cultural philosophies to intermingle freely throughout India, Egypt, Greece, and the ancient Near East. This groundbreaking reference will stir relentless debate among philosophers, art historians, and students.
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Temporary Autonomous Zone - by Hakim Bey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone1. Pirate Utopias 2. Waiting for the Revolution 3. The Psychotopology of Everyday Life 4. The Net and the Web 5. Gone to Croatan 6. Music as an Organizational Principle 7. The Will To Power as Disappearance 8. Ratholes in the Babylon of Information---
Nature of Code - by Daniel Shiffman
> How can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? How can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds?
> This book focuses on a range of programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems, from elementary concepts in mathematics and physics to more advanced algorithms that enable sophisticated visual results.
> Readers will progress from building a basic physics engine to creating intelligent moving objects and complex systems, setting the foundation for further experiments in generative design. Subjects covered include forces, trigonometry, fractals, cellular automata, self-organization, and genetic algorithms.
- 1. Painting a very broad brush, as in half of Eurasian philosophy, check out Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad's 'Eastern Philosophy' [1].
2. More technical, but a valuable introduction to analytic methods in classical Indian thought: Jonardon Ganeri's 'Philosophy in Classical India: An Introduction and Analysis' [2]
These are, of course, scholars writing in a scholarly vein. Two books about Guru figures with deep spiritual experience are:
3. Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, translated into English as 'The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna'[3]
4. Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi [4]
Finally, to take a comparative route:
5. Roberto Calasso's 'Ka' which is his take on the Vedic-Puranic-Itihasic Corpus as a whole [5].
and to understand how India meets Greece via Persepolis and Egypt:
6. Thomas McEvilley's 'Shape of Ancient Thought' [6]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Eastern-Philosophy-Dr-Chakravarthi-Ra...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Classical-India-Introducti...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Sri-Ramakrishna-Swami-Nikhilan...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Talks-Ramana-Maharshi-Realizing-Happi...
[5] https://www.amazon.com/Ka-Stories-Mind-Gods-India/dp/0679451...
[6]https://www.amazon.com/Shape-Ancient-Thought-Comparative-Phi...
- Kerala in particular and South India more generally has also preserved other Indian knowledge traditions well - Ayurveda comes to mind.
But despite my innate Indian nationalism I think the time has come to stop writing articles (or even having thoughts) like the one linked above.
Yes, many cultures, including several represented in the Indian subcontinent, had deep and important ideas. It's even likely that in some disciplines - the mind sciences being the most obvious - there are many ideas and practices that are waiting to transform and revolutionize 'western' science, whatever that might mean.
But the knee jerk chauvinistic instinct that says all science (& democracy & sliced bread) arose in Greece and the Indian/Chinese/Middle-Eastern response to counter that with continued fractions in the Lilavati (as well as spaceships and chimeras) has run its course in my view. Plain common sense and generosity suggests that insights have mingled across people's for millennia. One of my favorite sources for that belief: Thomas McEvilley's superlative "Shape of Ancient Thought." [1]
If anything, the events of the past weeks show that we are still stuck in a parochial mindset when the big problems of the present and the foreseeable future are all human in the expansive sense of that term. And why human - I would rather rather we started thinking with any number of other species that have something to teach us.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Shape-Ancient-Thought-Comparative-Phi...
- > Rome’s Asian contemporaries completely dwarfed Rome in almost every respect: heritage, population, cultural diversity, technology, architecture, medicine, philosophy, poetry…
> it’s always made me sad to think of the Romans being largely cut off from the main action on the world stage.
This is incorrect because the Romans knew about Greece - in fact they ran the place.
The Romans were barbarians, in a sense, I suppose, just compared to Greece. They didn't do anything that could compare to the Greeks in math or philosophy, for example. And by, say, the fall of the Roman Empire, India had far more interesting philosophy (sadly little known because not very accessible) than Rome, so sure, "Asia" had better philosophy than Rome (really India specifically). But it turns out that Indian philosophy was heavily inspired by Greek philosophy (highly recommend The Shape of Ancient Thought for anyone interested in Greek-Indian intellectual exchange), and I wouldn't say it was better (though I wouldn't say it was worse either). Rome wasn't cut off from the best of philosophy - they were just too practical to care much about it - and they knew it and said as much.
Philosophy I know something about - I dropped out of the PhD program at Harvard after studying quite a bit of it. But some of the other parts seem dubious or of questionable importance. Architecture? The Romans look pretty good to me there, and I mean they even used concrete. Medicine? Let's be serious: almost all medicine before the 1800's was placebo. Population? So what?
- > The Romans were barbarians, in a sense, I suppose, just compared to Greece.
This is definitely the case. Barbarian was a greek term centered around greece; while romans managed to avoid the label most of the time, they definitely fell into the category at points, e.g. in their worship of the Lares during the Republic.
> But it turns out that Indian philosophy was heavily inspired by Greek philosophy (highly recommend The Shape of Ancient Thought for anyone interested in Greek-Indian intellectual exchange), and I wouldn't say it was better (though I wouldn't say it was worse either).
Definitely. I will say that the philosophies in the original vedic texts are possibly the oldest things we can call "philosophy", even though the more popular hindu/buddhist derived philosophies were heavily hellenized by the fall of the roman empire. I also think that development of a koan, the "simultaneous truths", would have been vehemently rejected by the greek philosophers of which I am aware. Though they still had "middle road" type thoughts, it was not based around the acceptance of two contrary truths, even though you can form such a dialectic that way. Does this match up with your understanding? Do you know of anything framing vedic-derived philosophy in greek-derived terms? I often get swamped in the details when attempting to read through the material directly; doubly so for the ridiculously archaic older texts.
> Medicine? Let's be serious: almost all medicine before the 1800's was placebo.
Not quite true; Galen was an excellent surgeon, covered basic sanitation (e.g wash the wound and then bathe it in vinegar), and was THE reference until our knowledge of anatomy improved starting around the renaissance. But in this respect, the Romans certainly dominated the greeks, and their ability to treat soldiers on the field with the "state of the art technology" was absolutely crucial for the maintenance of a standing army, especially during periods of expansion (e.g. the tail end of the republic).
However, they had lost their edge by the fall of the empire to neighboring powers. That goes for nearly everything but IIRC engineering secrets, which were simply lost.
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