one step back. He believes that the earlier Greeks actually did more for the development of scientific thought than the later Greeks who diverted from technical, material, rational examination and analysis of the world as we find it, which is the basis of the scientific method.
In the end I most enjoyed what I first enjoyed least---the author's clear bias in favor of the earlier Greeks. Farrington's enthusiasm for the early Greeks and disdain for Plato and other later Greeks is finally refreshing. He writes effectively of the "purer and freer air" of Ionian science and the more manipulative efforts of Plato whose writing, for example, "was haunted by the necessity of repressing a servile labour force" (308-309). The early Greeks clearly had no such political purposes in mind.
Farrington, Benjamin. Greek Science. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969.
George Sarton, in The Study of the History of Mathematics primarily attempts to argue that the history of mathematics is both more interesting and more connected to other sciences than is generally beli
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