John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, often considered as one of the greatest and most influential Enlightenment thinkers in history.
Early Life and Education:
Born in Somerset, England in 1932, John Locke’s father was a prominent country lawyer. He was raised in a rural house in Belluton. Locke attended the famous Westminster School in London, and was later admitted to Christ Church, Oxford. He acquired a bachelor’s degree in 1656 and a master’s degree in 1658. He also obtained a bachelor of medicine in 1674.
Contributions and Achievements:
John Locke is widely considered to be one of the greatest English philosophers and a leading figure in the fields of epistemology, metaphysics, and political philosophy. He also made crucial contributions to education, theology, medicine, physics, economics, and politics. Locke’s empiricist epistemology (he was the founder of empiricist theory of knowledge) inspired Berkeley, Hume, and the later years of empiricism.
Locke’s political philosophy is often noted with shaping both the American Constitution and the French Revolution and laid the groundwork for liberal political thought. He was the first person to explain the self through a continuity of consciousness. He proposed that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Some of the Locke’s most noted works are “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, “Two Treatises of Government”, and “A Letter Concerning Toleration”.
Later Life and Death:
Locke never married in his lifetime. He died in 1704 at the age of 72. He was buried in the churchyard of the village of High Laver, Essex.