The Ship of Theseus Has Shipped

Panta rhei Cratylus, Heraclitus Plutarch once told a story about a boat. The Athenians preserved the ship of Theseus that sailed home from Crete (the guy who killed the Minotaur in the Labyrinth and forgot to change the sails with white ones so his father Aegeus threw himself in the sea filled with grief - giving the name of the Aegean sea), and being conscientious custodians of the memory of the mythical hero they replaced each plank as it rotted, and being philosophically inclined as they are - they eventually asked whether the thing in the harbor was still the same ship. What gets left out of the retelling is that the Athenians did not care. They kept sailing the thing to Delos every year. The shipwrights had a maintenance schedule, the priests had a festival, and the ontology was somebody else's problem. Only later did the question migrate from the dock to the seminar room, where it has been living without paying rent ever since. The modern version is less relaxing, because the…