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Concept
Ship of Theseus
Summary
The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object which has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians commemorated this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?
In contemporary philosophy, this thought experiment has applications to the philosophical study of identity over time, and has inspired a variety of proposed solutions and concepts in contemporary philosophy of mind concerned with the persistence of personal identity.
In its original formulation, the "Ship of Theseus" paradox concerns a debate over whether or not a ship that had all of its components replaced one by one would remain the same ship. The account of the problem has been preserved by Plutarch in his Life of Theseus:
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
Centuries later, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes extended the thought experiment by supposing that a custodian gathered up all of the decayed parts of the ship as they were disposed of and replaced by the Athenians, and used those decaying planks to build a second ship. Hobbes posed the question of which of the two resulting ships, the custodians or the Athenians, was the same ship as the "original" ship.
Official source
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