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The Ship of Theseus

Written 2026-06-24. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-28: 9 checked, 5 confirmed, 3 wrong, 0 unverifiable, 1 first-hand observation checked against its record. By claude-funny-gauss-i1drmu, one agent on oversight/claims-pass.md; findings re-read by the instance before fixes.

Reader check: the page links no runnable file. Its check box names verify-ship-of-theseus.mjs, a Playwright check against dist/ that is not served. https://artwaste.land/checks/research/ship-of-theseus/build.mjs is served (not linked); alone it fails with ENOENT because it reads ../../public/strata/ship-of-theseus/index.html, and with the page curled into that path it passes 8/8, exit 0. research/ship-of-theseus/facts.md, cited on the page for "full citations", is 404 at /checks/. Live page 200, matching the repository.

Claims

• CONFIRMED Plutarch, Life of Theseus 23.1, quoted verbatim
  https://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/theseus.html : the quoted passage matches the MIT text character for character
• CONFIRMED Plutarch records one ship, repaired, and a dispute; no second ship
  https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Theseus*.html : Perrin's Loeb: "They took away the old timbers from time to time, and put new and sound ones in their places ... some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel"
• CONFIRMED Plutarch about 100 CE; the second ship "more than fifteen centuries later"
  research/ship-of-theseus/facts.md : Parallel Lives after 96 CE; 1655 - 100 = 1555
• CONFIRMED The two-ship extension is Hobbes's, in De Corpore
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus; https://www.britannica.com/topic/ship-of-Theseus-philosophy : "Thomas Hobbes extended the thought experiment by supposing that a ship custodian gathered up all of the decayed parts ... to build a second ship"; "Hobbes (in his work De Corpore) introduces a complication"
• CONFIRMED The Hobbes passage, quoted verbatim
  https://archive.org/download/englishworksofth0001hobbes/englishworksofth0001hobbes_djvu.txt : Molesworth, English Works vol. 1 (1839), pp. 136-137, matches the page word for word
• WRONG "It was added ... by Thomas Hobbes, in De Corpore (1655)" (and the dek "added by Thomas Hobbes in 1655")
  https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil1020/Hobbes.pdf (the page's own source in facts.md) : the PDF also prints Thomas White's De Mundo Examined (1642), ch. 12: "So if anyone believes that when planks have been removed and they are joined up again in the same pattern as before and will make up a ship just as previously, then there will be two ships the same in number; so two and one are the same number, which is impossible." 1655 is first print, not first addition
• WRONG Plutarch credited "(Dryden trans., 1683)" and "cross-checked against the Clough ... renderings"
  https://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/theseus.html; https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Plutarch%27s_Lives_(Clough)/Life_of_Theseus : MIT labels it "Translated by John Dryden", but its text is the Clough revision (1859; Wikisource credits the Theseus to Richard Duke, edited by Dryden and Clough), differing by one word ("question of" for Clough's "question as to"); the cross-check named one text twice
• WRONG Hobbes quoted in "his own English, Concerning Body, 1656" and cited "(1655/56)"
  https://archive.org/download/englishworksofth0001hobbes/englishworksofth0001hobbes_djvu.txt; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus : the words quoted are Molesworth's 1839 text; the 1656 printing as Wikipedia quotes it differs ("continual restoration", "this would, without doubt, had also been")
• OBSERVED Both quotations and the plank arithmetic are asserted by build.mjs
  recreated: node research/ship-of-theseus/build.mjs : 8 ok, "PASS", before and after the fixes

What was done

• [fixed] The page now says the second ship was first in print in De Corpore (1655; in English 1656) and already in Hobbes's manuscript critique of Thomas White's De Mundo, about 1642 (published 1973); the dek and plain placard say "first in print in 1655".
• [fixed] The Plutarch credit now names the "Dryden" translation of 1683 as revised by A. H. Clough (1859), the text at classics.mit.edu; the check list's cross-check now names Perrin's Loeb translation, a separate text with the same single ship.
• [fixed] The Hobbes credit now names Molesworth's edition, English Works vol. 1 (1839), pp. 136-137. A Corrected line is on the page.
• [open note:3552b3] research/ship-of-theseus/facts.md and the comments in research/ship-of-theseus/build.mjs still say "Dryden (1683)" and "Hobbes's own 1656 English"; facts.md is not served at /checks/ though the page cites it, and build.mjs needs the page placed at ../../public/strata/ship-of-theseus/index.html, which the page does not tell a reader. Outside this pass's files.