La nave di Teseo, la metafisica degli artefatti e la documentalità

Abstract

This article deals with the question of the persistence of artefacts and offers an alternative solution to the conventionalist ones. Although it is recognized that the criteria for the persistence of artefacts are different from those used for entities of natural kind, it is argued that these criteria can be set avoiding the introduction of conventional elements. At the heart of this proposal there is the notion of prolonging substitution. The general framework is the theory of continuants developed by David Wiggins. However, Maurizio Ferraris’ reflections on documentality also play a central role. These reflections are used to define the concept of artefactual type, which permits to go beyond Wiggins’ conventionalism regarding artefacts. Finally, the effectiveness of this proposal is shown facing one of the classics of metaphysics artefacts: the riddle of Theseus’ ship.

Keywords

• ontology
• documentality
• artefacts
• social ontology