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Scholastic philosopher Rudolph Goclenius coined the term "psychology"; though usually regarded as the origin of the term, there is evidence that it was used at least six decades earlier by Marko Marulić.
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John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which claims that the human mind is a Tabula Rasa at birth.
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Immanuel Kant published Critique of Pure Reason, rejecting Hume's extreme empiricism and proposing that there is more to knowledge than bare sense experience, distinguishing between "a posteriori" and "a priori" knowledge, the former being derived from perception, hence occurring after perception, and the latter being a property of thought, independent of experience and existing before experience.
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Franz Joseph Gall developed Cranioscopy, the measurement of the skull to determine psychological characteristics, which was later renamed Phrenology; it is now discredited.
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Franciscus Donders first used human reaction time to infer differences in cognitive processing
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John B. Watson graduated from the University of Chicago; his dissertation on rat behavior has been described as a "classic of developmental psychobiology" by historian of psychology Donald Dewsbury.
