Once upon a time — at least according to the ancient Greek writer Plutarch — the hero Theseus sailed from Athens, Greece, to the island of Crete, where he slayed the half-man, half-bull Minotaur before sailing back to rule Athens.
The wooden ship that Theseus sailed on, Plutarch imagined, must have become a national treasure, and he posed a thought experiment that has fascinated philosophers ever since: If you repaired Theseus’ ship plank by plank so that no original planks remained, is it still the same ship?
“The people who’ve been sailing the ship will say, ‘Yeah, it’s the same ship! We’ve been sailing for years, and we just keep fixing it,'” said Michael Rea, director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame.
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