Talk:Proclus

Age and dates of birth/date

Can someone explain to me how someone born in 412 AD can die at the age of 73 years in 487 AD? Did the calendar skip a couple of years or something?
Alan U. Kennington (talk) 12:06, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Chrestomathy

Why this article doesn't mention the Chrestomathy? Its authory is disputed, but is an important work attributed to him. --Leonardo T. Oliveira (talk) 19:44, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

Strange spelling

Curious details: Why "Constantinopolis" (= Constatinople?). And why "412 AC" ("AC", if anything, means "ante Christum", which makes no sense here)? -S.

Anno Christi. But it should be fixed. Septentrionalis 14:40, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Strange phrasing

I changed "School of Philosophy" to Academy, but I didn't know what to make of this: "He became headmaster of Athens' School of Philosophy." Is there a less anachronistic way of expressing this? --Wetman 09:55, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Don't think so. --maru (talk) Contribs 03:53, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes. Septentrionalis 14:40, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Travel to Athens

What is the source of the 431 date for his journey from Alexandria to Athens? Nearly every other source (linked in the External links section) simply say he went from A to B when he was a teenager, implying 429 or 430, or give it as 429. --maru (talk) Contribs 03:53, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Additions

If more info related to this is available, it may be added:

• Biblio: On the Heratic Art according to the Greeks.

Wrong reference?

It seems that the last external link to Migne's PG is a mistake: it shows the collection of the patristic writings of ecclesiatical character by SAINT PROCLUS THE BISHOP (OF CONSTANTINOPLE), some 40 years senior to Proclus Diadochus, the "platonic successor". Perhaps an article could be made about Saint Proclus and the link transferred there. Actually Migne probably holds some translations of Proclus' work into LATIN done early on by William of Moerbecke (Gulielmus (de) MORBEKA) which, however, I was unable to locate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.9.125.136 (talk) 16:59, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

External links modified

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2021-2022 Update of Proclus Article

Extensive work, that includes adding and editing text, adding subtopics, adding tables, adding images and adding 243 unique and probably over 400 overall citations, has been carried out on the Lead-in, Biography, Influence and Works topics.

I am currently heavily involved in editing and adding text and citations to the Neoplatonic Theology topic.

The following subtopics will need to be added under the topic Neoplatonic Theology before discussing the hypostases: the One, Intellect and Soul:

. Some Basic Principles

. Relations of Causes and Effects

. Cyclic Creativity

. Participation

. Potentiality-Actuality (Dynamis-Energeia)

That basically will follow the structure of the General Introduction of the authoritative modern text: Proclus' Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, translated by Morrow & Dillon 1992.

Darylprasad (talk) 18:59, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

23rd November 2021

The topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' is in an early stage of development. The first stage was a basic skeleton suggest by Morrow and Dillon 1992 in their 'General Introduction'. Fleshing out the skeleton has started with information from Dodds 1971. It will take some time to adequately structure the topic to conform to the late Neoplatonic order of logic. That is what I am working on now. A heavy amount of citations will be made to Dodds 1971 but will endeavour to find other citations along the way as well as quotes from familiar sources to make the topic easier to understand. A lot of work is still required.

Regards Daryl

Darylprasad (talk) 01:59, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

5th December 2021

The topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' is still in an early stage of development. Citations from Morrow and Dillon 1992 have been overlaid with specific and technical citations from Dodds 1971. The structure of the topic now accurately represents late Athenian Neoplatonic theology. There might be some text added to the topic 'A Dyad' and minor technicalities added to the topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' as I re-read it in the coming weeks and months. Other than Dodds 1971, and to a much lesser extent Morrow and Dillon 1992, it is difficult to find other modern authoritative English sources for late Neoplatonic theology, hence the numerous citations in that topic by those authors.

The topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' also needs a topic called 'Forms', which I am endeavoring to write soon. Because of the complexities of this topic, I have left it to last as the late Neoplatonic doctrine of Forms is more complicated than Platonic Forms, which were themselves complicated and hard to understand.

The rest of the article seems accurate and stable, only minor modifications might be required as I re-read it in the next few weeks and months. In general the article is a decent summary of Proclus' life, influence, works and late Athenian Neoplatonic theology.

Darylprasad (talk) 05:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

14th December 2021

The topic 'Forms' under the topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' is in its final stage of development and is organized, after a general introduction, by the paragraph headings:

Immanent Forms

Double Activity

Principles of Reason (logoi)

Progression of Forms

Paradigmatic Causes

The primary source is d’Hoine & Martijn 2017 as there simply is no other clear scholarship that is readily available on this very important aspect of Neoplatonic theology.

The entire article Proclus, apart from the topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology', is now in its final stage of development.

The topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' will take some time, weeks or months, as authoritative sources are hard to find and some like Dodds 1971 are very technical and difficult to reword to a level suitable for Wikipedia.

Darylprasad (talk) 03:23, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

17th December 2021

I am currently reviewing and editing the topic 'Souls' as the initial writing of this topic used Morrow and Dillon 1992, which not clear and too unique when compared to other scholars. I am now using d’Hoine & Martijn Chapter 6 Proclus on the Psychê by Finamore & Kutash, which is clearer and more consistent with other scholars on the subject of Souls. Morrow and Dillon 1992 is very good for the theological levels of Nous and above, as that is what the 'Commentary on the Parmenides' is about. The topic 'Nous' also needs a gentle introduction and when I find one, I will reword it and add it to the topic.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Regards Daryl

Darylprasad (talk) 07:39, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

31st December

I am currently heavily editing the L2 topic 'Souls'. This topic is very complicated as the late Neoplatonists made various divisions of Plotinus' theological level of Souls, and to add to the complexity, modern scholarship is not consistent in naming those divisions. Hence there is a much work needed to clarify and elaborate that topic and its subtopics.

There is months of work still needed on parts of the topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology'. Specifically, a lot of information will be added to the topics 'Henads' and 'Nous', which are only in their early stages of development. Much will be added to these two important topics. I will move onto those topics after clarifying and elaborating the topic 'Souls' and its subtopics.

Regards Daryl

Darylprasad (talk) 23:55, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

1st January 2022

The topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' will take a long time to get in order. Please be patient.

Material has been moved from the L2 topic 'Souls' to the L2 topic 'Propositions' and as a consequence, repeated and confusing material has been removed. As work progresses, there will be more of that kind of activity. The spine of the whole topic 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' is Proclus' 'Elements of Theology' and I am making a huge effort to reflect the structure of Dodds 1971 'Elements of Theology'.

Again, please be patient as the information being added is now becoming more rigorous. Superficial and confusing material is being replaced. The L2 topic 'Souls' is in better shape than L2 'Propositions' Much work is still needed on L2 'Propositions'.

Regards Daryl

Darylprasad (talk) 13:04, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

20th January

The topic 'Souls' and subtopics are in good order and nearly complete. There will be a few more additions to it and a review to remove unnecessary complexity. The spine of the topic is the rigorous work Dodds 1971. All other topics under 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' are just beginning their development and need to be heavily edited by incorporating Dodds 1971 as their spine. That will take a while. I will update you on my progress next month.

Regards Daryl

Darylprasad (talk) 21:16, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Too long and overly detailed

This article is becoming too long and overly detailed, per WP:DETAIL, WP:BECONCISE, WP:SUMMARY, etc. The article also seems to contain a great deal of synthesis, original research, interpretation and personal point of view not in an encyclopedic tone per WP:TONE.

Perhaps it needs to be split in "Proclus" and something like "Proclus (philosophy)" per WP:SPLITTING, WP:SIZESPLIT, WP:CONTENTFORKING, etc. - Epinoia (talk) 01:20, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi Epinoia,

Thank you for your message.

Well at least someone is awake! I thought I was just writing to myself on this talk page.

With respect to original research:

All non-standard terms like 'Neoplatonic theological level' have been replaced by terms in strict conformity to 20th and 21st century Neoplatonic scholarship. There never was any original research, as all sentences have been cited, just a confusion of terms, which has now been rectified.

With respect to length:

Please be patient, the subject matter of the article is very difficult. Yes it now needs to be split, as it has reached some kind of length barrier.

With respect to detail:

Please be patient, yes it is detailed, but that is the nature of the subject matter. When the article is split, this article will contain less detail. I expect it will be split into the existing topic on Proclus' book called 'Elements of Theology'

With respect to 'synthesis' which means 'the combination of components or elements to form a connected whole.', I certainly hope it is. Maybe you had better elaborate on what you mean, with specific examples.

Regards

Daryl Prasad

PS: I am a bit exhausted at the moment from writing the article and reading the modern scholarship. So things may take a while. I hadn't expected to write so much, but it seemed necessary to give justice to the theology.

Darylprasad (talk) 19:32, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

- WP:SYNTHESIS: "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any source. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source."

- also, avoid giving instructions to the reader per "Instructional and presumptuous language", MOS:INSTRUCT, "Simply state the sourced facts and allow readers to draw their own conclusions"

- also it may be better to plan out your revisions to the article more carefully to avoid repeated small additions and deletions which make it difficult to follow the changes. - cheers - Epinoia (talk) 21:56, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi Epinoia,

Thanks for your message.

I feel refreshed again. It is wonderful what a good sleep does.

With respect to WP:SYNTHESIS, MOS:INSTRUCT,

Please supply concrete examples.

With respect to length

Yes the article now needs to be split, as it has reached some kind of length limit. As to what page it needs to be split to, I'll think about that and how to go about doing it. Your suggestion of Proclus (Philosophy) is very good. However, I would like to expand the existing topic "Elements of Theology" as that is the book that is the spine of the topic "Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology" and since that article is already there, why not save some Wikipedia resources and use it?

For now, I don't anticipate any lengthening of the article. My next focus will be working on the split. I'll focus on that in the next few months. That will provide me with a necessary break from reading modern Neoplatonic scholarship, and will give me more time to read text by Proclus.

Regards

Daryl Prasad

WP:SYNTHESIS is a misleading title, as the word synthesis has very little to do with what is stated in the policy. Maybe it should be called WP:CONCLUSIONS.

Darylprasad (talk) 04:53, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Review

Dear All,

I will be reviewing the article in the next few weeks and will probably make minor corrective changes and elucidations where necessary, sometimes by adding relevant quotes. I will only add a new topic to 'Late Athenian Neoplatonic Theology' if it elucidates one that is already there, there will be no new topics on completely different subject matter.

Influence Topic

Because of extent of new scholarship on Proclus' influence in the Middle Ages, e.g. the 2 volumes of Calma 2019-2020 "Reading Proclus and the Book of Causes", I have organized Middle Ages reception of Proclus into Middle Ages Greek Reception, Middle Ages Byzantine Reception, Middle Ages Islamic Reception and Middle Ages Latin Reception.

List of Influence Topic

The table that comprises this topic has been changed to a simple chronological listing. A region-based division of influence is already in the 'Influence' topic. The chronological listing is easier to update and clearly shows Proclus' influence since the 5th century. Also, small descriptions of the influence have been removed from the table as the elaborated descriptions are already in the 'Influence' topic

Regards

Daryl Prasad

Darylprasad (talk) 00:02, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Technical

Dear All,

The following template has been removed:

This section may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (January 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

For this reason:

"Some topics are intrinsically complex or require much prior knowledge gained through specialized education or training. It is unreasonable to expect a comprehensive article on such subjects to be understandable to all readers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_articles_understandable

Please do not put it back until you have discussed it on this talk page. There are a lot of articles on Wikipedia that this template could be added to but are not because "It is unreasonable to expect a comprehensive article on such subjects to be understandable to all readers."

The scholastic material on this subject requires "much prior knowledge" and so the article tends to reflect this as you can't write what you want because that would be considered 'original research'.

Put simply, you need to have read a lot of text and analysis on Homer, Plato, Plotinus and Greek tragedies before reading Proclus. Similarly you need to know a lot of mathematics before reading a page on differential calculus.

Late Athenian Neoplatonic theology is complex by nature and requires "much prior knowledge". If you have trouble understanding a particular topic, discuss it here and I will endeavour to explain it to you in my own words rather than having to rely on scholastic material.

Again, please discuss the addition of any templates here first and seek approval before simply adding it to the article without discussion.

Regards

Daryl Prasad

Darylprasad (talk) 02:51, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Length

Dear All

With respect ot length:

Previously I thought this article needs to be split; however given that the following are longer, I have changed my mind:

(hist) ‎2021 in American television ‎[470,355 bytes]
(hist) ‎Firefox version history ‎[469,668 bytes]
(hist) ‎Miss Grand ‎[469,551 bytes]
(hist) ‎List of Nintendo DS games ‎[462,298 bytes]
(hist) ‎Dragons' Den (British TV programme) ‎[431,850 bytes]
(hist) ‎2018 in paleontology ‎[429,197 bytes]
(hist) ‎DC Extended Universe ‎[433,524 bytes]

etc...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages

Proclus is more important in history and philosophy than much of the long articles in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages.

And so I have changed my thoughts about splitting the article.

Regards

Daryl Prasad

Darylprasad (talk) 03:56, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

headings

A lot of what should be headings in this article are just text that is rendered bold italic. Would it be controversial to convert those to subheadings as per WP:MOSHEAD?~TPW 21:12, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I think that would make the TOC too long. I started that way, by making subheadings, but realized that the TOC would be very long and after L3 headings, you really can't tell the difference between L3 and L4 etc...it just makes the article less readable and a bit confusing because the format of the lower level headings are the same. All it does is make the TOC cumbersome. Thanks for discussing it here first.

Regards

Daryl

Darylprasad (talk) 05:53, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

{{TOC limit}} provides a way to conform to MOS without causing the TOC to be too long. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:02, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Further Reading and External Links

Just a note to say Well Done to the person or persons who edited the 'Further Reading' and 'External Links'. They are comprehensive, different to the citations and very well thought out. I have used some of the references to add new and current information to the body of the text. Thanks heaps, they are fantastic.

Regards Daryl Prasad

Darylprasad (talk) 12:17, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

My Work on this Article is Predominantly Finished

Dear All

I think my work on this article is predominantly finished; however, I will edit the article:

. If new information becomes available;

. if there is a need to fix technical errors and content errors;

. if I find redundant and repetitive citations;

. if I can improve expression;

. if I can find better quality images;

. if I can find, in the case of the map, a more accurate image;

. If I can make the article more aesthetically pleasing.

Thanks for your patience.

Have a lovely day!

Regards

Daryl Prasad

PS: I am currently working on the Neoplatonism Article.

Darylprasad (talk) 03:50, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

Bibliography of Translations

Dear All

I have added a 'Bibliography of Translations' so that ALL sfns link to the relevant translation for easy reference. Still a few to add to this section for Plato, Aristotle and others.

HOWEVER: All links in 'References and Citations' should now take you to the relevant work.

Regards

Daryl

Darylprasad (talk) 11:17, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

Dear All

ALL citations for translations now link to the relevant translation in 'Bibliography of Translations'

also

All links in 'References and Citations' should now take you to the relevant work, either in 'Bibliography of Translations' or 'References and Citations'

Regards Daryl

PS: If you find one that doesn't, please leave a note in this topic.

Darylprasad (talk) 18:53, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

TOC level

Dear All,

The TOC level has been changed to 'TOC limit|4' for the ease of navigation for a reader and for me whilst I am editing the article.

Regards

Daryl

Darylprasad (talk) 17:47, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Length of Article

Dear All,

Regarding:

'This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. Its current readable prose size is 153 kilobytes. Please consider splitting content into sub-articles, condensing it, or adding subheadings. Please discuss this issue on the article's talk page. (June 2022)'

Subheadings have been added (a while ago) to improve navigation. The TOC level may be increased to aid navigation.

With regards to splitting or condensing the article, that is far easier said than done. In writing the article, much effort has been made to condense scholarly text.

With respect to length:

I repeat my remarks from February 2022

Previously I thought this article needs to be split; however given that the following are longer, I have changed my mind:

. (hist) ‎2021 in American television ‎[470,355 bytes]

. (hist) ‎Firefox version history ‎[469,668 bytes]

. (hist) ‎Miss Grand ‎[469,551 bytes]

. (hist) ‎List of Nintendo DS games ‎[462,298 bytes]

. (hist) ‎Dragons' Den (British TV programme) ‎[431,850 bytes]

. (hist) ‎2018 in paleontology ‎[429,197 bytes]

. (hist) ‎DC Extended Universe ‎[433,524 bytes]

etc...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages

Proclus is very important in history and philosophy than many of the long articles in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages.

Due to the introduced subheadings, and the immense amount of work needed to design a split of the article, the template has been removed. Further, the template could be put on articles that are longer than this article and so it seems superfluous and quite selective and has been removed.

Regards Daryl Prasad

Darylprasad (talk) 23:26, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

Darylprasad this article certainly has to be split, and is well over the recommended limit. There really no cause for dispute here; all of the articles you list should be split as well, I would not use them as helpful comparisons. I would recommend creating an article entitled something along the lines of Legacy of Proclus and moving much of the extremely detailed influence section there. Aza24 (talk) 03:31, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Hi Aza24

What you suggest would involve an extensive amount of work with regards to citations and references as they cannot simply be cut and pasted.

First all the references that are not in the bibliography would need to be added to it, and sfn tags to them. Then citations need to be re-linked to the new bibliography entries via sfn tags. This might make the division easier.

At the moment the only references in the bibliography are the translations. Those references and sfn tags were added after, and it took about a week (full time) to relink the citations to them.

At the moment the first draft is is one place. The task of splitting the article is a lengthy future project.

Thank you for your thoughts and patience.

Regards

Daryl Prasad Darylprasad (talk) 18:38, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Hi Darylprasad. It seems clear to observers that this article is too large, and should be split or condensed. This should not be regarded as something bad, that this article needs to be split, but rather that the amount of work that has been put into this article demonstrates that the topic is important enough to cover more than one article. Often it is relatively unimportant articles that become extremely large due to a lack of attention, while more important articles are managed far better and the topics split across multiple articles. I have added a template to the top of this page calculating the sizes of the article's sections, and I hope this can be used to help you determine which section can be split and expanded further into its own article. Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:24, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi Onetwothreeip. Thanks for the template. I am thinking about the best method to split the article.

(1) Initially, new references for Book citations will need to be created in the bibliography with sfn tags (apart from translations, which has already been done).

(2) New sfn citations to those new references will then need to be inserted for all current Book citations, replacing the current Book citations.

The steps (1) and (2) will initially make the article longer, and will take a considerable amount of time.

(3) The relevant HTML might then be able to be cut and pasted into a new article (which will include all the references from the Proclus bibliography)

(4) After that, extraneous references in the bibliography of the new article will need to be deleted.

(5) A new Lead for the new article will also have to be written.

Darylprasad (talk) 01:10, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Pageviews

Since I predominantly finished my rewriting of this article on the 8th of April 2022, the page views have gone up from 122/day (7/1/2015 - 4/8/2022) to 155/day (4/8/2022 - 9/17/2022)...a 27% increase in page views per day. So I think that readers like the new longer article and all the citations that make the article more reliable.

Darylprasad (talk) 04:19, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Issues with prose

Reading through this article, it seems like a lot of the prose is a bit excessive. For example, every philosopher is described as "x-century philosopher" and many sentences are repeated. Concerns have been raised about the length of this article but I'm not actually sure that splitting is the right solution here - I think that the page length can be greatly reduced without actually removing any meaningful content simply by rewriting a lot of the sections to have a more encyclopedic tone. - car chasm (talk) 16:09, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Fundamental problems with article

I'm sorry but after spot-checking a few references, I've reverted this article to a version in last september. While I was initially hesitant to discourage what seemed like a lot of hard work on a topic not well covered by wikipedia, this article contains massive amounts of original research.

@Darylprasad: please move your prior contributions to your WP:sandbox to work on them further - adding large amounts of unsourced material or material not supported by secondary, reliable sources to a page is disruptive editing - car chasm (talk) 16:23, 29 September 2022 (UTC)