Ship of Theseus - in Literature

In Literature

Robert Graves also employs the "grandfather's axe" version in his historical novel, The Golden Fleece, first published in 1945.

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum, a lumberjack's cursed axe chopped all his limbs one by one, and each time a limb was cut off, a smith made him a mechanical one, finally making him a torso and a head, thus turning him into the Tin Woodman, an entirely mechanical being, albeit possessing the consciousness of the lumberjack he once was. Conversely, in the book The Tin Woodman of Oz, the Tin Woodsman learns that his old human body parts (minus the head) were sewn together to create a new man who then married his old sweetheart.

David Wong's book John Dies at the End, the book opens with David musing about the continual identity of an axe which has its handle replaced after it is damaged in the course of the slaying of a man, and then the head replaced after being used to slay a half-badger, half-anaconda monstrosity. The axe wielder, returning from the hardware store where the axe's new head was fitted, is confronted by the zombie of the man slain earlier who cries out in terror that he wields the axe that killed him. David muses over the validity of the zombie's statement. Although he doesn't revisit or attempt to answer the question, it becomes clear by the end of the book that the axe is merely a metaphor for a much stranger supernatural incident he was involved in.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld series pays homage to Heraclitus's statement by claiming that the polluted and slow-moving to the point of being solid River Ankh in the city of Ankh-Morpork is the only river that is possible to cross twice. There are also numerous references to the supposed inability of witches and wizards to cross the same river twice (e.g., in Lords and Ladies); the wizards refute this by demonstrating that an agile wizard can cross and recross a small river many times an hour. Also, Senior witch Granny Weatherwax possesses a flying broom whose handle and bristles have been replaced many times, yet remains unreliable to the point that she has to run up and down very quickly to essentially "bump-start" it. Pratchett also directly references the paradox in The Fifth Elephant, for instance in the axes of the dwarves, and in his early novels The Bromeliad.

All incarnations of the Ghost in the Shell franchise deeply involve Theseus' Paradox in terms of full-body prosthetics. A recurring theme is the question of what defines humanity, if the entire body has been replaced by machines.