Peter Simons (Philosophy, Leeds) writes with the following interesting item:

Turner Prize – and the winner is … philosophy!

The announcement that the Turner Prize 2005 has been won by Simon Starling’s conceptual installation Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No 2) (picture here)  may annoy art traditionalists but must delight philosophers interested in existence and identity through time. It plays out in real life a scenario evoked in a 1980 paper by Michael Burke in "Cohabitation, Stuff, and Intermittent Existence," Mind 89 (1980): 391-405. Burke envisages a table which is dismantled, the wood used to make a chair, this is dismantled and the material used again to make a stool and a birdhouse, then these are dismantled and the wood reassembled to make a table again just like the original. Burke then  upheld two metaphysical propositions: that the table assembled at the end is strictly and numerically identical with the original table, and that this one table did not exist during the time when the chair existed and the stool and birdhouse existed. In other words, contra Locke, existence can have two beginnings, and things may exist intermittently. I think Burke is right (Simons, Parts 197-8).

The English artist Simon Starling did something similar. While cycling along the banks of the Swiss Rhine, he came upon an old boat shed used to house the local kind of boat called a Weidling (below a picture of one).

Starling then (presumably after getting permission – we are talking Switzerland here) dismantled the shed, used the wood to make a 10 m long Weidling, navigated it 10 km downstream to Basle and then reassembled the shed in a museum there.

Purists may baulk at some of Starling’s deviations from pure reassembly: he used caulking to seal the boat’s joints and some steel brackets, but like an honest artist he left this material in the reassembled shed. Also not all the wood was used: that which was not was loaded into the Weidling as cargo. Here the shades of Messrs Hobbes, Locke and Hume may commence a disputation.

Does the example prove Burke right? Of course not: this is metaphysics, not mathematics or crossword puzzles. But Starling’s own description from the Tate Britain’s website, and that of all the art critics I have looked at, leave no doubt that they conceive of the final shed as numerically the same as the original one. They are a little less sure in expression about whether the shed made the Rhine trip. And no one dares to think the shed might not have existed while the boat made the river trip. No matter: that’s why they’re journalists and not academics.

Do you want to win next year’s Turner Prize? Then get building. I can even suggest a project:

The Shed of Theseus.