Discarding the old idea that philology consisted in a minute acquaintance with words and the exercise of the critical art, he regarded it as the entire knowledge of antiquity (totius antiquitatis cognitio), historical and philosophical.

He divides philology into five parts: first, an inquiry into public acts, with a knowledge of times and places, into civil institutions, and also into law; second, an inquiry into private affairs; third, an exhibition of the religions and arts of the ancient nations; fourth, a history of all their moral and physical speculations and beliefs, and of their literatures; and fifth, a complete explanation of the language.

In his speech at the opening of the congress of German philologists in 1850, he defined philology as the historical construction of the entire life – therefore, of all forms of culture and all the productions of a people in its practical and spiritual tendencies.

A work of a similar kind was his Metrologische Untersuchungen über Gewichte, Münzfüsse, und Masse des Alterthums (1838).

[6] In regard to the taxes and revenue of the Athenian state he derived a great deal of his most trustworthy information from inscriptions, many of which are given in his book.

When the Berlin Academy of Sciences projected the plan of a Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, Böckh was chosen as the principal editor.

Another of his earlier papers, and one frequently referred to, was Commentatio Academica de simultate quae Platoni cum Xenophonte intercessisse fertur (1811).

Other philosophical writings were Commentatio in Platonis qui vulgo fertur Minoem (1806), and Philolaos des Pythagoreers Lehren nebst den Bruchstücken (1819), in which he endeavoured to show the genuineness of the fragments.

An early and important work on the Greek tragedians is his Graecae Tragoediae Principum ... num ea quae supersunt et genuine omnia sint et forma primitive servata (1808).

Böckh's lectures, delivered from 1809-1865, were published by Bratusehek under the title of Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften[9] (1877; 2nd ed.

John Paul Pritchard has made an abridged translation of Böckh's Encyclopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften: August Boeckh, On Interpretation and Criticism, University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.