IV—Kumārila Bhaṭṭa on the First-Person Pronoun

In metaphysical debates about the self, realist philosophers like Kumārila Bhaṭṭa must account for uses of the first-person pronoun that seem to predicate properties inconsistent with the supposedly enduring, immaterial self. Responding to Buddhists like Vasubandhu, in his ‘Position on the Self’ chapter of the Commentary in Verse, Kumārila argues for an invariantist position, despite his well-known contextualist strategies for explaining the meaning of nouns like ‘self’. I show how this strategy accounts for the problem sentences and resolves a further potential problem that might arise with the possessive pronoun ‘my’ when its complement is the word ‘self’.