Plato was the first person to organize and record the issues and questions that define philosophy. As Socrates' student, Plato preserved the teachings of his great mentor in many famous "dialogues"; these deal with classic issues like law and justice, perception and reality, death and the soul, mind and body, reason and passion, and the nature of love. The dialogues also discuss the value of moral principle vs. the value of life itself; how to achieve virtue; and how each of us can fulfill our true nature.
For Thomas, intellectual knowledge is a sign of the spirituality that energizes the human center. He saw the Bible as a substitute for the wisdom of a lifetime's study and learning. All in all, Thomas concluded that mortal happiness (felicity) is uncertain, but immortal happiness (beatitude) is the ultimate end of life; beatitude is to pass beyond death to "see the face of God."
St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) was the first great systematic Christian philosopher. He attempted to combine the philosophical insights of Plato with the faith explicated in the Bible. Augustine thought of Plato's eternal forms as ideas in the mind of God; he believed that the Eternal Christ provides the light of knowledge to the human mind. For Augustine, every time we make a judgment of relative value, we implicitly acknowledge an absolute standard of value, which is God. His Confessions constitutes one of the timeless statements of faith and self-surrender.
Before Kant, philosophers had debated for centuries whether knowledge is derived from experience or reason. Kant says that both views are partly right and partly wrong, that they share the same error; both believe that the mind and the world, reason and nature are separated from one another. Building on an insight from Hume, Kant says that our reason organizes our sense perception to produce knowledge. The mind is a creative force for understanding the manifold of new, unconceptualized sense impressions with which the world bombards us. And Kant says we cannot know the "thing-in-itself" - the object apart from our conceptualization of it.
Hawk is in jail in San Francisco, where he has gone to help Susan Silverman, who's in trouble. Susan contacts Spenser, but when he gets to California, Susan has vanished. Spenser breaks Hawk out and the two embark on a search for Susan that takes them back and forth across the country.
