On the Theology of Plato

The apparatus — 800 leaves, 201 readings read from a page image →

Every recorded repair, with the words it changes, why it was made and the witness it rested on, browsed on its own page by reading and by leaf: the edition’s whole scan in leaf order, the readings decided from each leaf, and the readings that carry no page image listed in their own right. The log is also served with the edition as one plain file at /texts/proclus-theology-of-plato-taylor-1816/v/1.0.5/apparatus.json.

Version 1.0.5 — pinned. The current version is 1.0.6, which may differ. This page is the edition as it stood at 1.0.5, and it is never rewritten.

A transcription being repaired, not a clean text. What stands here is a transcription of the printed edition below — every character of it kept — with the repairs that have been decided recorded as rules and applied to the reading view. Each repair is a rule with the words it changes, why, and the witness it was decided from; the rules are applied by the view and are never baked into the words served, so the transcription is always beside its repairs and the difference between the two views is the repair list itself. Where the print's word could NOT be determined — from the transcription's own context, from a parallel edition of the same translation, or from another copy of the same print — no repair is invented: the scanner's damage stays, marked, and a rule records the decision to leave it. The work is therefore NOT finished: this edition is readable from end to end, and a reader will still meet garble where nothing could settle the print's word — what was settled is settled and shown, what was not is shown as the transcription has it, and nothing is silently said that the print does not.

The state of this edition: in repair — this text is READABLE BUT STILL GARBLED. The transcription it is built from is a good reading of the 1816 print, not a faithful one, and where nothing could decide what the print actually says, the reading view shows the transcription’s own wrong characters, marked as damage — so a reader will meet passages that read as garble, and this page does not pretend otherwise. The whole text has been read, and the witnesses were the second transcription of the same 1816 print that stands beside this one on the shelf, together with the other copies of that same print held here — their own scans, their own page images, their own reading of the page. Every reading those could settle is recorded as a rule and applied by the reading view: each rule gives the words it changes, why, and the witness it was decided from, and where two copies of the print read the same words at the same line, the rule says that, because two independent readings of the same print agreeing is what makes the reading worth trusting; where the witness was a copy’s own page rather than this edition’s, the rule names that copy and the leaf of it the words stand on. What could not be settled is left standing and named, not hidden: the questions still open keep their reasons — a reading nothing places on the line it was asked about, a page line two answers came back for, a word the page itself will not read — and the reading view shows the transcription’s characters there rather than a guess. The edition is therefore not finished and not clean: what was settled is settled and recorded, what was not is visible, and the work of settling the rest stands open. Measured on the text this page serves: 3263 repair rules, applied 3800 times. 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 800 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 scan of this volume (item thomastaylor), 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 (3999 read, 3999 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 (2513 in this text, 1891 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: 5,795 words that mix an "f" with a "t"; 2,120 negation signs (¬) standing where the print has none; 601 of its 2,513 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 217 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 648 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 217 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 3 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.

The repairs, as rules. Every repair the reading view makes is a recorded rule applied to the transcription’s own words — 0 for the divisions, 0 for the numbers and note markers the transcription wrote through an OCR digit confusion, and 3263 for the damaged words whose reading this edition RECORDS (3800 applications in this text) — 3800 applications of those rules in all, each rule firing at least once (a rule that fires nowhere is caught before this page is produced, not shipped as machinery nothing reads). The reader’s own list of repairs shows each rule, the words it changes, why, and how many times it fires — that list IS the difference between the two views, so the repairs can be checked against the transcription word by word. The policy is: a recorded reading is substituted, and where none is the transcription’s own characters stay. The reading view therefore shows the print’s word where one is recorded and the transcription’s damage where none is, and that surviving damage is counted in TWO classes, stated apart because they are different things: 550 damaged word(s) no rule resolved, shown with the damage still in them and named in the reader’s repairs list under “damaged words left visible”, and 68 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 1186 damage character(s) the reading view still shows, over the text the reading view renders (the note definitions and the unlabelled paragraphs included). Every one is marked, so a reader can see that it is damage and not a typo by the author. Where a reading is not determinable from this transcription, a rule records that decision (0 rule(s), action “leave”) instead of deleting the marker and saying nothing, and a damaged word no rule names is left the same way. The damage set the marking uses was MEASURED on this transcription (every character standing inside a word of it that its own print cannot set there), not guessed: it is stated once, in the shared base policy every text's rules are written under. No rule removes a damage character without recording a reading; a rule that did would make the edition say something it does not, which is the one thing this architecture exists to prevent.

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. SIX BOOKS OF PROCLUS — 3603 paragraphs
2. CHAPTER XXXIII. — 396 paragraphs