Benjamin Farrington (1891-1974) was an Irish scholar and professor of the Classics. Born in Cork, he was educated in Ireland and taught at the university level in Ireland and South Africa. He wrote several books on the development of scientific thought in Western culture, with a particular emphasis on the contributions of the Greek philosophers and Francis Bacon.
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Farrington obtained his university education at University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin. He was a lecturer in the classics in Belfast, taught for fifteen years at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and was a Professor of Classics for over twenty years at Swansea University, Wales.
In the 1940s he became involved with socialist politics and a series of lectures he gave in Dublin schools was used as the basis of his pamphlet The Challenge of Socialism.
He retired from teaching in 1961.
"We are tantalized because his case is so nearly good, and might have been very good. If only he would avoid ridiculous overstatements bound to alienate,... Lastly, the book annoys, because ... it abounds in misleading statements or half-truths." — W. K. C. Guthrie, review of Science and Politics in the Ancient World, The Classical Review, 54(1940): 34-5.
"There is enough truth in Professor Farrington's main contention to cause one to wish that his book had been more fairly conceived. Let it be granted that politics and vested religious interests have often opposed the scientific spirit;... Yet it remains true that Greek humanism is as notable an achievement as Greek science.... Science is the chief foe of superstition, but to suppose that science alone will ever achieve man's good is itself a grandiose superstition." — William C. Greene, review of Science and Politics in the Ancient World, Classical Philology, 36(1941): 201-2.
"Professor Farrington, in this book, conclusively shows that the Popular Superstition which in the Ancient World formed so effective an obstacle to the progress of science was a supersition which was, for the most part, deliberately thought out by the 'patricians' and deliberately foisted by them upon the 'plebians.'" — M. F. Ashley Montagu, review of Science and Politics in the Ancient World, Isis, 33(1941): 270-3.
"Farrington's Greek Science thus seems at once very stimulating and very biased, excellent in many respects but to be read with a critical mind. Until a better book on the subject comes along—and that may not be soon—it will fill a considerable need for a readable work dealing with the science of the ancient Greeks." — Bentley Glass, review of Greek Science: Its Meaning for Us, Quarterly Review of Biology, 30 (1955): 281.