3 Answers

  1. There was an ancient Greek hero, Theseus. Known primarily for killing the Minotaur, but he's also done a lot of other good things. He killed Procrustes, who had the famous “Procrustean bed”. There is a Soviet cartoon about him. Since the Minotaur lived on the island of Crete, it was only possible to get there by ship, so Theseus had to get one.

    This was Theseus ' ship.

    Plutarch writes that when Theseus returned from Crete to Athens, the Athenians kept his ship until the 3rd century BC, regularly replacing the damaged boards.

    It has already turned out that it was he who became the reference illustration to the problem of identity.

    The problem of identity is a philosophical problem, quite typical. We use some common language in everyday life and this language is not clear. We intuitively distinguish objects from the world in one way and not another and assign these characteristics to these objects, but the question always remains-why so, is it possible otherwise, and if so, how correctly? Very many philosophical questions are reduced to this type in one way or another.

    They also stand for identity. After all, we operate with such a characteristic, which means that we can raise questions : how can we talk about identity and how should we talk about it?

    And when an example was needed, they took the ship of Theseus.

    If you think that the identity problem is a far-from-real chatter, then here is a simple practical application of this problem.

    We punish people for their misdeeds and reward them for their achievements. When we do this, it only makes sense if there is a clear connection between the act and its consequences in the form of punishment/reward. Obviously, you can't punish Vasya for the theft committed by Petya. But in what cases is the Petya we punish still the same Petya who committed the theft? We do not punish, for example, those who have committed a crime in a state of confusion? We treat them. This means that there are circumstances that change people so much that they are no longer the same people who committed the crime. Here, in order to clarify what ways people can be considered “the same” or “not the same”, in order to argue about which of these ways is more correct – this is what the ship of Theseus is for.

  2. The simplest explanation without clever thinking. When the ancient Greek hero Theseus arrived at his homeland in Athens, and he sailed from the island of Crete, where he killed the Minotaur, so-when Tesseus sailed from Crete, his ship was put on a pedestal as a monument. The ship gradually deteriorated, but the Athenians constantly repaired it so that it would be preserved in memory of the exploits of Theseus. And after 100 years, maybe a little more/less on the ship there is not a single detail left from the original ship. And there is such a paradox-the ship seems to be the same, but not the original at all. Hence the question – can this ship be considered the same ship of Theseus? From the point of view of logical parodoxes, the question is still open.

  3. One of the paradoxes in philosophy.

    The essence of which is that for many years the object, in our case the ship after which the paradox was named, was stored and operated, gradually being repaired, old boards were replaced with new ones, all the details of the ship. And philosophers, at that time and in those places, any sneeze was accompanied by a philosophical look, a question arose –

    Is this ship the same as it was in the beginning? Or even more whiplash, if from the old parts of the ship, in an unknown way to assemble the same ship will this second ship be the same as the first?

    Formally, this paradox goes something like this -“If all parts of the item are replaced with other parts, will the item still be the same?”

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