Descartes wants to prove that knowledge of the physical world can be acquired through reason, an explanation that eventually relies on the corpuscular or atomistic theory. In this theory, all matter is made of corpuscles, far too small to see, with ...
The first great 17th century empiricist John Locke borrows many ideas from Descartes. For the most part he accepts the corpuscular theory, but flatly rejects the notion of innate ideas about the world. Gottfried Leibniz concedes that innate ideas ar...