Led Zeppelin and Philosophy: All Will Be Revealed by Scott Calef

Author:Scott Calef
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780812697766
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
Published: 2011-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

A Traveler of Both Time and Space

When we talk about identity, what it means for something to be the thing that it is, the place to start is always with a challenge posed in ancient Greece by the writer Plutarch. When Greek civilization was rising, the Persians possessed the mightiest military on Earth. Trying to put down Greece, the Persians launched an offensive against them, an attack that was foiled by Theseus, whose naval maneuvers cleverly defeated the stronger Persians.

Out of reverence, Theseus’s ship was kept as a monument to the battle, symbolizing Greek strength and freedom. Being made entirely of wood, it was subject to rot. So, each rotting board would be replaced with a new fresh one so that the ship would remain to remind each generation of what happened.

But, Plutarch asked, after each and every piece had been replaced over the course of time, was it still Theseus’s ship? Was it a different ship? Let’s change the example a little. Suppose there is a captain who fixes part of his own vessel. Surely it is still the same one he had when he bought it. Over the course of many voyages, parts would be replaced, eventually all of them, but when he goes to sail away and leave today, he can truly say that “This ship has been all around the world.” It seems like there is a difference between the working vessel and the ship of Theseus. To figure out what, we need to know what makes a thing a thing.

There are three standard approaches to answering this question. The most obvious is that a thing is what it is if it is made of a certain stuff. Comedian Stephen Wright’s joke about coming home to find everything in his house had been replaced with an exact replica is funny, but not impossible. There could be exact replicas that are nevertheless still distinct things. If someone claimed to have the guitar Page used in the Houses of the Holy sessions, you’d call bullshit. Pictures of the guitar from the sessions, no matter how exacting, would not be convincing evidence. This is, most likely, a replica. The difference between the two guitars is that this is not the actual wood Page had in his hands while recording. It’s a question of material identity. To be the same guitar as Page’s, it has to be the same actual matter. Of course, the strings, tuning pegs, and pickups may have been changed on the original, maybe even the frets and neck; this is a normal response to wear and tear on a guitar. But at the least there would still have to be the original matter that comprises the body. We can call this the “matter notion of identity” and according to it, Theseus’s ship and the replica guitar are different from the originals.

Unfortunately, the matter notion of identity, while plausible, runs into problems when we talk about people. It’s true that Alison Krauss recorded with the vocalist of Led Zeppelin.

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