VIII

PREFACE

Furthermore, there are no abbreviations of word-endings except for the letter o with a mark placed above it, which you may interpret as either os or on original: ος or ον at your discretion. Besides the symbols ⸓ and ·//., there are frequent shorthand signs for "and so forth," "therefore," "is," "human being" original Greek: κτ, πο, πε, ἄνος, and certain others brought over from mathematical books.

Errors in the writing, besides those mentioned by Diels Hermann Diels (1848–1922), a scholar famous for his work on pre-Socratic philosophers, occur quite frequently in the codex, but they are mostly minor and can be corrected with little effort. Likewise, the gaps, of which there are many, can—with a few exceptions—be easily filled based on the meaning of the passage.

Examples of simple propositions original Latin: enuntiatio; a statement that is either true or false were added to the commentaries by the same hand. Stephanus (following the lead of Ammonius) calculates the number of these on pages 39 and 54 of the text. However, the person who compiled these examples did not complete the task; he stopped at those propositions that have a third thing predicatedoriginal Greek: τρίτον προσκατηγορούμενον; this refers to the "is" in a sentence like "Socrates is just," where "just" is the third element added to the subject and the copula. and those that are modaloriginal Greek: μετὰ τρόπου; refers to modal logic, which deals with necessity, possibility, and impossibility.. It is clear that this table of examples is not by Stephanus himself from the fact that, in placing the negation "not" original Greek: οὐ, he frequently deviates from Stephanus's own rules. For instance, the examples "Socrates (or not-Socrates) does not possibly walk" and "is not possibly just" take the place of affirmations with an indefinite predicatealso called an "infinite" predicate, such as "not-just" or "not-walking.", whereas it should have been said: "Socrates is possibly not-walking" or "is not-just." For, as Stephanus explicitly states on page 56, line 24, the former versions are negations. Conversely, the following is called a negation with an indefinite subject and a definite predicate: "not-Socrates possibly (necessarily, impossibly) does not walk," which in reality is an affirmation with both an indefinite subject and predicate. Finally, in the negations "no not-human (not every not-human) does not possibly walk," "does not necessarily breathe," "does not impossibly fly," if the commentator had intended the predicate to be indefinite, the word "not" should have been joined to the predicate rather than the modethe qualifier of the action, such as "possibly.". It is therefore sufficiently clear that these did not originate from Stephanus. Nevertheless, since it appeared that these were not much later in age (due to the antiquity of the Paris manuscript itself), I decided to attach them to Stephanus’s book so that the school practices of that era might be revealed.

Written at Toruń
October 26, 1884                           Michael Hayduck