John Locke
John Locke was an influential English philosopher widely regarded as the father of British Empiricism and a foundational contributor to social contract theory and liberal political philosophy.
His ideas profoundly shaped epistemology, influencing thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant, and left a lasting mark on the American Declaration of Independence.
Locke famously argued that the mind begins as a tabula rasa, rejecting the Cartesian notion of innate ideas and asserting that knowledge derives from experience.
He was also the first Western philosopher to define personal identity through the continuity of consciousness.
