ABSTRACT
Alan G. Wagner in “The Zen of Theseus: Language and Reality from a Buddhist Philosophical Perspective” uses “The Ship of Theseus” to question how an object could “still be the same thing [if it] never has the same shape or physical composition from one moment to the next.” In Buddhism, reality is simply an “ongoing flux of overlapping continuities”; whatever way we may choose to slice it up into distinct, discrete elements is, in fact, only “a reflection of our own opinions, interests, viewpoint, and attachments.” With language, we apply “names” to the divisions that we create, but when we look deeply, we can find no clear dividing lines anywhere, even for our most basic concepts such as “I” and “not-I” or “real” and “unreal.” In this way, Buddhists have pursued the same question that philosophers from Plato to Hobbes puzzled over, but from quite a different perspective.
