(August 29, 2015 at 9:15 pm)Nestor Wrote:(August 29, 2015 at 6:33 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: Could you expand on this, Nestor?It's quite simple Randy. The idiom derives from an era when our most thoughtful predecessors actually believed they were thinking, deciding, feeling, etc., with their heart.. They were wrong but the notion has retained its common, albeit incorrect, usage.
How is the idea that the term "heart", a metaphor or idiom for that innermost place within man, problematic?
What are we really saying when we say that an athlete has "heart" or that we know something to be true in our "heart of hearts".
Yes. It is like we now metaphorically say that the sun rises and sets (well, those of us who do not have a pre-Copernican view of the solar system mean them as metaphors). The ancients, though, were not being metaphorical when they said those things.
The reason we use those as metaphors is because many ancients got it wrong. Just like the heart example. There are likely many other such ways of speaking based on ancient error, that are now merely metaphors when they were originally meant literally.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
