Ship of Theseus

It has inspired a variety of proposed solutions and concepts in contemporary philosophy of mind concerned with the persistence of personal identity.

[1] Another common theory, put forth by David Lewis, is to divide up all objects into three-dimensional time-slices which are temporally distinct.

[5] Noam Chomsky says that this is not an unassailable assumption, from the perspective of the natural sciences, because human intuition is often mistaken.

[8] According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the deflationist view is that the facts of the thought experiment are undisputed; the only dispute is over the meaning of the term "ship" and is thus merely verbal.

[1] American philosopher Hilary Putnam asserts that "the logical primitives themselves, and in particular the notions of object and existence, have a multitude of different uses rather than one absolute 'meaning'.

[citation needed] In Europe, several independent tales and stories feature knives of which the blades and handles had been replaced several times but are still used and represent the same knife.

The ancient Buddhist text Da zhidu lun contains a similar philosophical puzzle: a story of a traveller who encountered two demons in the night.

Diagram of ship getting its parts replaced
As the parts of the ship are replaced, the question remains as to whether the same ship remains throughout.
A Fresco from Pompeii depicting Theseus and Ariadne escaping from Crete. According to Plutarch, the Athenians preserved the ship that Theseus used to escape, by replacing the parts one by one as they decayed.