  Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, who likely flourished around 660 ce, was a proponent of the orthodox Brahmanical school of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. Among the most influential thinkers in the history of Indian philosophy, he made significant contributions regarding the full range of issues that follow from that school’s constitutive concern with Vedic authority and exegesis; virtually all Indian philosophers writing subsequent to him—and particularly Buddhist philosophers, whose positions were most completely antithetical to his—found it necessary to reckon especially with his work in epistemology and philosophy of language. Among the areas in which he exercised lasting influence are hermeneutics, poetics, jurisprudence, and (arguably) historiography. Chief among the doctrines that have occasioned philosophical interest in him is that of svataḥ prāmāṇya—“intrinsic reliability,” which might be understood as immediate justification—which surely represents Kumārilas most significant epistemological contribution; occasionally dismissed as fundamentalist in spirit, this has come to be appreciated (sometimes in light of the “reformed epistemology” advanced by contemporary thinkers such as William Alston and Nicholas Wolterstorff) as a cogent working-out of the kinds of commonsensical epistemic intuitions characteristic of Thomas Reid. Together with a robust realism about linguistic universals and the peculiarly Mīmāṃsaka conviction that the Vedic texts are eternal, this epistemology was effectively deployed by Kumārila to show that a commitment to the uniquely authoritative status of the Vedas (and to the ritual practices enjoined thereby) was rationally held.