John Locke (1632-1704) was an English philosopher and physician who is considered one of the vastly influential thinkers of the Enlightenment period. His ideas about government, human nature, and the limits of knowledge have had a deep influence on modern political and social thought.
Locke's most famous work is his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," published in 1689. In this work, Locke asserted that all knowledge comes from experience, rather than innate ideas or principles. He believed that the mind is a "blank slate" (tabula rasa) at birth and that we acquire knowledge through sensory experience and reflection.
John Locke's idea of the "tabula rasa" is a prominent concept in his philosophy of mind and epistemology. The term "tabula rasa" means "blank slate" in Latin, and Locke used this term to illustrate his view that the mind is bereft of innate ideas at birth and that all knowledge and ideas come from experience.
According to Locke, the mind is like a blank slate on which experiences are engraved, and it is through these experiences that we gain knowledge and form beliefs. This is in contrast to the view held by some philosophers of his time, such as Descartes, who believed that some ideas are innate and are present in the mind from birth.
Locke also proposed that knowledge is built up from simple ideas that are derived from experience and that more complex ideas are formed by combining these simple ideas. He distinguished between primary and secondary qualities of objects, where primary qualities are objective features of the object that exist independently of the observer, while secondary qualities are subjective and depend on the observer's perceptions.
Altogether, Locke's concept of the tabula rasa was a vital development in the history of philosophy, as it called into question the prevailing view that the mind is pre-programmed with innate ideas and paved the way for a better empirically-based approach to understanding the nature of knowledge and the mind.