The issue that emerges after the boat race around the world this year is a question of identity. It is raised by the wording of the rules for the race on the one hand and by the events that took place during the race this year on the other.
The race leaves Los Angeles harbor each year, and the competitors circumnavigate the globe and return to the harbor in Los Angeles. There are two conditions to decide the contest:
1) the same boat must successfully circumnavigate the entire globe;
2) the same boat must be the first to cross the finish line in Los Angeles.
This particular year, the weather conditions were harsh and caused the boats considerable trouble. The crew of the Chameleon was faced with the need to replace part after part during the voyage, and they threw away each of the unusable pieces as they replaced them. By the time the Chameleon reached Los Angeles, every part of the original boat had been replaced. The Chameleon was declared the winner.
Samuel Cavenger had followed along and retrieved each discarded piece from the waters, and by the end of the race he had all the original parts to the boat and reconstructed it. He now claims that he has the real Chameleon and thus the real winner, and this is the issue that the tribunal must decide.
One of the key issues in Greek philosophy concerned the matter of change and its opposite, permanence, and many of the earliest philosophical arguments centered on matters of change, motion, and their relationship to the passage of time. In considering another issue, the question of what the basic stuff of the universe might be, the stuff from which all else is composed, the ancient Greeks wanted to answer this question so as to solve the problems of apparent stability and actual change, also related to the passage of time during which that which is stable seems to change and become something else. Heraclitus stated that it was not possible to step into the sa...