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=== Locke's Influence ===
Locke’s ''Essay'' posited an argument for rejecting the older, scholastic model of knowledge and science in favor of his empirical one, and it was very successful.[[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)|p. 77]] Although Locke’s ''Essay'' contained much of Cartesian thought, Locke’s work was seen as refutation of Descartes, and moved philosophy toward that.[[CiteRef::Chapelle Chappelle (1994)|p. 261]]
Locke’s arguments against innate ideas was part of his support of the importance of “free and autonomous inquiry”. Locke’s ultimate goal was to show his readers that they could be
"free from the burden of tradition and authority, both in theology and knowledge, by showing that the entire grounds of our right conduct in the world can be secured by the experience [they] may gain by the innate faculties and powers [they] are born with."[[CiteRef::Chapelle Chappelle (1994)|p. 252]]
Locke’s ''Essay'' was also considered the start of British empiricism, which became the preferred mode of philosophy among future Anglophone thinkers such as Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell and Ayer.[[CiteRef::Chapelle Chappelle (1994)|p. 261]]
|Criticism=Locke’s ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' was heavily criticized. Gottfried Leibniz responded, point-by-point, to Locke’s work in his rebuttal, ''New Essays on Human Understanding'', where he disagreed with Locke’s rejection of innate ideas. Leibniz writes that there is no way all our ideas could come from experience since there are no real causal interactions between substances. In addition, Locke’s claim that the mind was a blank paper at birth violated Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles.[[CiteRef::Cook (2013)]] Fellow empiricist George Berkeley was also critical of Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities—Berkeley claimed that primary qualities as well as secondary qualities were a product of the human mind, and not a part of the object.[[CiteRef::Turbayne (1957)]]
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