The empiricists believed that our conceptions of what exists come from experience. Many of the great philosophers have believed this theory and many now regard the empiricism as simply common sense. However, this was not the case when John Locke first proposed it. Locke's ideas were revolutionary in his own day. He advised his followers not to follow convention and to think for themselves.
Consequently, Locke's ideas made their way into the work of Voltaire in pre-Revolutionary France and even into the ideas of the founding fathers of the United States.
Locke was educated in the Westminster school and in Christ's Church, Oxford. He was involved in politics and also in medicine. He worked for years on his philosophical masterpiece entitled "Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689.
At the time of its publication Locke was 57 years of age. He also published the "Letter Concerning Toleration" in the same year, as well as "Two Treatises of Government which he published in 1690, as well as "Some Thoughts Concerning Education" published in 1693.
He lived to be 72 years of age and all of his major writings, as will be noticed, came out within five years of one another.
In many ways George Berkeley, or Bishop Berkeley as he was known, represented a reaction to Locke. Berkeley was born in Ireland in 1865 and was educated in Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. All of his famous works were published while Berkeley was in his 20's. He became an individual of international reputation and offered a radically philosophically new perspective in his "Principles of Human Knowledge" published in 1709.
He was made a Bishop in the church and is often referred to as Bishop Berkeley and had connections with Yale University and city of Berkeley California, as well as the University of Berkeley California bear his name.
Berkeley died in 1763 at the age of 67.
