The Ship of Theseus
Replace a ship's planks one at a time until not one original piece is left. Is it still the same ship?
c. 75 CE (Plutarch's report of an older dispute)20 min read
English early modern philosophy
Thomas Hobbes
1588 – 1679
English philosopher, best known for Leviathan. In De Corpore (1655) he sharpened the Ship of Theseus into its modern form by imagining a second ship rebuilt from the discarded planks, and observed that treating both as the original would give you two bodies numerically the same, which he called absurd.