From Slate: This big-picture notion of reality, existence, and the world as it is dates back 2,400 years to the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato believed that what's real isn't the things you can touch and see: your computer, your desk, those empty barrels in Iraq that Bush thought were full of chemical weapons. What's real is the general idea of these things. The idea of a computer. The idea of a desk. The idea of an Iraqi threat to the United States. Whether you actually have a computer or a desk, or whether Saddam Hussein actually had chemical weapons, is less important than the larger truth. The abstraction is the reality. Plato's successor, Aristotle, took a different view. He thought reality was measured by what you could touch and see. That's the definition of reality on which modern science was founded. It's the definition Colin Powell used when he told the world Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. It's the definition David Kay used when he set out to find the weapons. Kay and Powell are dismayed by our inability to see and touch the weapons. But Bush isn't. He isn't going to let Aristotle's reality distract him from Plato's. http://slate.msn.com/id/2095160/
As a professor of Ancient Greek philosophy, I just have to say that that is a sophomoric understanding of Plato.
As someone who took an Ancient Greek philosophy class (about half of which was devoted to the Pre-Socratics) almost 20 years ago as a sophomore, I'd have to say that you might even be giving the article too much credit.
No, I think the article is valid. The Plato/Aristotle stuff does not spoil the main point - that Bush the Younger has a very simplistic view of the world, and he will not allow (nor will his handlers allow) facts to get in the way of it.