General Knowledge
Which philosopher's 'ship' paradox questions identity over replacement?
- Theseus
- Heraclitus
- Parmenides
The answer is Theseus. The Ship of Theseus.
Plutarch reports that the Athenians preserved the ship in which Theseus was said to have returned from Crete, replacing planks as they rotted, and that this became a standing example for philosophers arguing about growth and change: at what point, if any, does it stop being the same ship?
Hobbes added the move that makes it genuinely nasty. Suppose someone had collected every discarded plank and reassembled them. Now there are two ships, and each has an excellent claim - one has continuity of form and history, the other has all the original matter. They cannot both be the ship of Theseus, and there is no obvious principle that picks between them.
It is not a museum piece. Every cell in a body is replaced over time; a band can tour under its name with none of its original members; the Grand Shrine at Ise has been demolished and rebuilt to the same design every twenty years for over a millennium, which by one standard makes it the oldest building in Japan and by another makes it new. When Notre-Dame burned, the whole public argument about whether to restore it exactly or rebuild it differently was this paradox, being conducted by people who mostly had not heard of it.