Theseus was the mythical Greek founder king of Athens. The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment of ancient philosophers like Heraclitus, Plato etc., going back to 500 – 400 BC. This experiment is about whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.
“As the planks of Theseus ship need repair, it was replaced part by part, up to a point where not a single part from the original ship remained in it anymore. Is it, then, still the same ship?”
If it is not the same ship, then at what point did it stop being the Ship of Theseus?
Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) was an English philosopher and one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is known for his 1651 book ‘Leviathan’, in which he expounds the social contract theory. He introduced a further puzzle to the Ship of Theseus:
“If all the discarded parts were used to build another ship, which of the two, if either, is the real Ship of Theseus?
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional.
What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.
Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
