Talk:Ship of Theseus

Hi, Larry. Quite a little problem with that ship, eh? I first heard the problem about a man who owned a Chevrolet and slowly but surely replaced all the parts with Ford parts. Question: when he was finished, did he have a Chevrolet or a Ford? If a Ford, where did the Chevrolet go?

It puzzled us when we were sophomores in college. It still puzzles us.

"Whoa there," I might say. Seems to me (I continue), although not being a real philosopher, that the traditional distinction in Western thought between "form" and "content" can be applied here. In "form," the ship is still Theseus' original ship, if we assume that the workers took great care in replacing each piece with an exact a replica as they could. But, in "content," it is now a new ship, made of new wood, and so on.

Well, OK, that sounds good, but it isn't not quite good enough. What, exactly, are "form" and "content"? So off we go to visit Plato. The form is the ideaos and -- hmmm... Looks like the problem is deeper than it seemed... Or we can wander around in the middle ages, trying to distinguish "essence" = "substantia" and "accident."

The problem isn't dead yet, either. It came up with a vengeance with Darwin, because if two distinct species -- distinct in "form" = "morphology" -- share a common ancestor, then once they weren't so distinct, and once they were the same. Hmmm... hold it. What do you mean by "they"? Or "the same"? With the introduction of the so-called "biological" species definition in taxonomy, late in the 1930s and afterwards, the problem grew more acute. By now, the literature about issues arising from the piece-by-piece replacement of parts of one species with other parts became very large indeed.

So, over here, the formalists; over there, the processualists; and over there -- in brief, a never-ending riddle with some very deep implications. I'm looking forward to reading what you say about the question!

Timothy Perper 11:04, 25 September 2008 (CDT)