The significance of the semantic range of the term ἀρχή in the thought of sixth century Greek philosophers analysed on the basis of the meanings of certain words containing the ἀρχ- root in early Greek poetry
The significance of the semantic range of the term ἀρχή in the thought of sixth century Greek philosophers analysed on the basis of the meanings of certain words containing the ἀρχ- root in early Greek poetry

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present a classification of the meanings of the term ἀρχή in literary sources up to the sixth century B.C., when the first philosophers, i.e. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes appeared. Although ἀρχή has been a topic of discussion at least from the times of John Burnet who denied the possibility of its having been an original Presocratic term and insisted that it was only a word, used by Aristotle and his followers for the principle of the early Greek philosophers, I feel that this matter did not get its fair share of attention. To allow for a better understanding of the semantic range of the term ἀρχή, I investigate the presented analysis of various meanings of certain words with the ἀρχ- root, most notably ἄρχειν (ind praes. act. ἄρχω) from whose verb-stem the noun ἀρχή is formed. This paper does not make a claim for a decisive argument in the discussion of the term ἀρχή by the early Greek philosophers but only analyses the semantic range of this and other words with the same root. The aim is to determine if such an investigation will shed some light on the reasons why the term was adopted for in the Presocratic philosophy.

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