Ship of Theseus
Thought experiment about identity over time / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having had all of its original components replaced.
In Greek mythology, Theseus, mythical king and founder of the city 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 would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one after the other, 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.