The leaders of rationalism in modern European philosophy...

The leaders of rationalism in modern European philosophy were all natives of the European continent: France, the Netherlands and Germany were the homes of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz during a period which spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The most famous of the modern empiricists were all eighteenth century British philosophers: Locke, Berkeley and Hume, although precedents can be found for empiricist thought in Britain extending as far back as Roger Bacon and William of Ockham.

Among more recent philosophers, empiricism continues to exert a strong influence, so that William James referred to his version of pragmatism as "radical empiricism", and Rudolf Carnap, after giving up on Logical Positivism, called his philosophy "Logical Empiricism". What all the various forms of empiricism have in common is an emphasis on the…