On the Theology of Plato

The apparatus — 722 leaves, no readings recorded yet →

No repair has been recorded for this version yet, so the apparatus carries no reading: it opens on the edition’s WHOLE SCAN in leaf order, every leaf of it readable, and says so where each leaf is opened. The log is also served with the edition as one plain file at /texts/proclus-theology-of-plato-taylor-1816/v/1.0.0/apparatus.json, and each emendation will be written into it as it is made.

Version 1.0.0 — current. This is the version a bare /texts/proclus-theology-of-plato-taylor-1816/ serves. A new version is a new URL; this one is kept, so a citation to it keeps resolving.

A transcription, not a repaired text. What stands here is a transcription of the printed edition below — every character of it kept — and no repair has been made to it yet, so the reading view and the transcription view are the same words. Every damaged character the scanner left stands as it stands, MARKED as damage rather than read as the print's own text, and nothing is silently corrected. Each emendation will be recorded as a rule with the words it changes, why, and the page image it was decided from, as it is made: the book and chapter structure below was recovered from the edition's own page images, and the repairs will be made against those images in the same way. Until they are, this page shows the transcription as imported and says so.

The state of this edition: in repair — the transcription as imported, its OCR damage not yet repaired. The text is readable end to end — the book and chapter structure was recovered from the page images of this edition, with a second transcription of the same print as a witness — but no emendation has been made yet: every damage character the scanner left stands visible in the reading view, marked, and the repairs list is empty. Each emendation will be recorded as a rule with the words it changes, why, and the page image it was decided from, as it is made; until then this page serves the scanned transcription and nothing more. A site is cleared by reading the printed page itself (the page images are kept with the edition); where one is still open, the reading view shows the transcription's damaged characters, marked, rather than a guess.

Edition. The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, translated from the Greek, to which a seventh book is added in order to supply the deficiency of another book on this subject which was written by Proclus but since lost, by Thomas Taylor, 2 vols (London: printed for the author, 1816). This edition serves the Theology of Plato alone, over the two volumes the print gives it: vol. I entire, and vol. II only as far as the Theology runs in it (its printed pages 1-299). It stops there deliberately, and the printed volume does not: vol. II's next work is the Elements of Theology (its printed pages 301-441), which is a work of its own and already has its own edition in this library, and the treatises follow the Elements (On Providence and Fate, the Ten Doubts concerning Providence, and the Subsistence of Evil). Carrying vol. II on to the treatises would not serve this work; it would serve a second work twice.

The source page images. The edition’s whole scan — all 722 leaves of it — is stored with the edition and served, one image per leaf, at /texts/proclus-theology-of-plato-taylor-1816/scans/. The apparatus opens on them and browses every leaf of it in leaf order, so a leaf a reading was decided from can be opened beside the reading, and a leaf no reading used is readable all the same; the readings that carry no page image are listed in the apparatus in their own right. They are the Internet Archive's scans of the 2 items this edition's leaves come from (item taylor-theology-of-plato-en-t.-1-1816 and item taylor-theology-of-plato-en-t.-2-1816), a public-domain work like the transcription. The editorial layer over them — the repairs and their rationales, the page models, the apparatus — is the part released under a licence of its own; see the licence below.

What was done to the text. This paragraph is the MECHANICAL work, which changes presentation and never a byte: what the text is corrected by is the recorded rule list, described under "the repairs, as rules" below and inspectable in full in the reader's own repairs panel. Nothing here is corrected against the print or modernised — the rules repair the transcription's damage, they do not edit the edition, and the transcription view shows the pages with no rule applied. The mechanical work, and these are all of it — paragraphs break where the print leaves a blank line (14753 read, 14753 written, the same count); hard line breaks inside a paragraph are joined into one line, and runs of spaces collapsed to one; a word broken across a line break is rejoined, its hyphen taken as the printer’s break and dropped, except where the word before it is a compound that carries a hyphen or where the next line begins with a capital, and then the hyphen stays; and a short line that reads as a heading becomes one (135 in this text, 90 at top level). Whatever was not a heading is a paragraph, so no passage is lost.

How to read this page. The transcription runs in the order of the printed volume’s own pages, so the digitiser’s stamp, the title pages and the book’s own contents list stand where the book put them, before the text proper. The contents block at the head of the text jumps to any heading in it, and every passage that is not a heading is a paragraph, so no page of the volume is skipped over.

What the transcription gets wrong, and you will see. Measured on the text of this page: 3,784 words that mix an "f" with a "t"; 39 of its 135 headings are a bare page number. These are the defects the repairs do NOT reach: a corrected text is a new edition, and this page is a transcription of a printed one whose damage is repaired only where a reading could be determined (see the repairs, below, for what is reached and what is left). What is left is left in place AND NAMED rather than deleted. A word that reads oddly is usually the transcription and not the edition: the long s of the print is frequently taken for an f, and a page number of the volume stands in the running text where the printer put it. Where a heading is a bare number it is the volume's own pagination, not a division of the work.

The edition this page carries. The same text is served here as an edition rather than only as prose: the document holds its 215 numbered sections, the 4 printed page numbers recovered from the volume’s own running heads and bare folios — 4 of them from a bare folio whose head’s words are gone, 0 interpolated between two numbered leaves, and 348 marker(s) left UNNUMBERED because no number could be read there — its 0 notes, every one of them defined with each of its 0 references resolved in both directions, and the whole text as one plain file for reading without scripts and for citing. The words served are the transcription, uncorrected; the repairs travel as rules rather than as a second text, so the difference between the two is a list anyone can read against the words that are served.

The contents list is generated. The printed volume has no contents page — nothing stands between its title page and its first division — so the 215 entries above are generated from the divisions the edition itself makes, each titled with its own opening words and each carrying the printed page it opens on. The opening words of 6 of those divisions are damaged in the transcription by more than the repairs can restore, and those entries state the gap instead of showing damaged words as a title: the transcription’s own words stand beside the entry, and no title is invented for it.

No repairs recorded yet. This version carries NO repair rules: the reading view and the transcription view are the same text, because no emendation has been made. Nothing is hidden either — every damaged character the scanner left stands visible in the reading view, MARKED as damage so a reader can see it is the scanner’s and not the author’s, and no word is silently corrected. The damage that stands is counted in TWO classes, stated apart because they are different things: 1158 damaged word(s) the transcription carries, and 1141 standalone marker(s) — one or more damage characters standing as their own token BETWEEN words (a lost space, or the scanner’s debris) — which are NOT words and are not counted as any. Between them they account for every one of the 16336 damage character(s) the text shows over the stretch the reading view renders (the note definitions and the unlabelled paragraphs included). Each emendation will be recorded here as a rule — the words it changes, why, and the page image it was decided from — as it is made. The policy, once rules are written, is: a recorded reading is substituted, and where none is recorded the transcription’s own characters stay.

Where it is cited. The essays on the blog whose subject is this work: proclus-theology-of-plato. The link goes out to the essay — the texts stand on their own; the essays are one reader’s reading — and a passage can be checked against the edition it was taken from.

Attached readings. proclus-theology-of-plato — essays on the blog, linked out.

Licence. The transcription is public domain; the editorial work — repairs, page models, apparatus, notes — is CC-BY-4.0. The transcriptions are public-domain works. The editorial work — repairs, page models, apparatus, notes — is released under CC BY 4.0. See about for the full statement.

1. REESE — 13954 paragraphs
2. CHAPTER XLIV. — 799 paragraphs