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|Brief=A British philosopher who championed empiricism, arguing that all knowledge was derived from experience
|Summary='''John Locke (1632-1704)''' was a British philosopher, writer, political activist, medical researcher, Oxford academic, and government official. Among his most notable works is ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'', which provides a defense of empiricism and the origins of ideas and understanding. In this work, Locke rejects the idea of innate principles, and argues that all knowledge comes from experience. Locke also wrote on religious toleration and social contract theory. He opposed authoritarianism and argued that individuals should use reason to discover the truth.
|Historical Context=Locke lived in politically turbulent times for England. Conflicts between the King and the Parliament and between Protestants, Anglicans, and Catholics led to civil war in the 1640's, when Locke was a teenager. King Charles I was defeated and killed. The monarchy was abolished in favor of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate in the 1650's. The protectorate collapsed and the monarchy was restored in 1660, around the time Locke finished his bachelor's degree. In 1668, King James II was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution in favor of William of Orange and his wife Mary. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)|p. 3]]
Although Locke was born into a family of modest means, he was able to obtain an excellent education by way of his father's connections. In 1647, at the age of fifteen, he began studies at Westminster School, considered London's best. At twenty, he began studies at Christ Church College, Oxford. His studies focused on logic, metaphysics, and languages taught within the framework of '''Aristotelian scholasticism'''. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)| pp. 3-4]] This was more than a century after Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) had posited his '''heliocentric cosmology''' in 1543, and forty years after Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) had published his observations with the telescope in 1610. Both were strong challenges to Aristotelianism. [[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|p. 6]] Like many ambitious students of the time, Locke doubted Aristotelian scholasticism and sought resources outside the formal curriculum. He became involved with a discussion group centered on John Wilkins (1614-1672) In the Wilkins group, Locke was exposed to the '''experimental philosophy''' and the ideas of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who argued for an '''inductive methodology''' for science. Many Wilkins associates were interested in pursuing medicine by observation rather than reading classic texts. The Wilkins group was the nucleus of what would later become the '''Royal Society''' of England, which became a formal institution in the 1660's. The society set itself in opposition to the Aristotelian scholasticism of the universities, advocating the study of nature rather than of ancient texts. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)|p. 4]]
Locke received his bachelor's degree in 1656. He was elected a senior student of Christ Church College and decided to study medicineand chemistry. When John Wilkins left Oxford after the restoration of King Charles II, and the new leader of the Oxford scientific group was became Robert Boyle (1627-1691)who was . Boyle ascribed to the '''corpuscular mechanistic philosophy''' associated with [[Rene Descartes]] (1596-1650), that held that the visible properties of the natural world were due to interactions between invisibly small particles or corpuscles. He is noted for his application of experimental methods in physics physical experiments and became Locke's scientific tutor.Locke read Boyle's works and those of Descartes, though he also learned from his experimentalist associates to be skeptical of Descartes rationalism.
|Major Contributions==== Locke's Empiricism ===