John Locke (1632-1704) was born in Somerset, England. After attending the Westminster school he studied philosophy at Oxford University, then still under the influence of medieval scholasticism. He became deeply interested in both medical research and the experimental science of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, whom he knew as a member of the Royal Society. Although he became a medical doctor, he turned his full attention to philosophy after reading Descartes' Meditations and seeing how a method might be worked out that could accommodate the progress being made in the newly emerging sciences. Whereas Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz were all rationalists who, like Plato, held that knowledge must be attained by the light of reason, Locke was an empiricist who claimed, as did Aristotle, that knowledge could only be attained by the light of experience. Locke fully agreed with Descartes, however, that the mind and our ideas are better and more directly known than physical objects, which are known only indirectly through our idea.

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)