Grant, George Parkin

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grant_(philosopher)
  • Wiki Biography:
    • George Parkin Grant OC FRSC (13 November 1918 – 27 September 1988) was a Canadian philosopher, university professor and social critic. He is known for his Canadian nationalism, a political conservatism that affirms the values of community, equality and justice and his critical, philosophical analysis of the social and political effects of limitless technological progress. As a practising Christian, Grant conceived of time as the moving image of an eternal order illuminated by love.
    • Many of his writings express a complex meditation on and dialogue with the great thinkers of Western civilization including the “ancients” such as Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine of Hippo as well as “moderns” such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, James Doull, Simone Weil and Jacques Ellul. Grant distinguished between civilizations of antiquity in which people believed that sacred stories, rituals and myths revealed universal order and the civilizations of modernity that came into being with the rise of Western science, the rapid development of industrial technologies and the prevailing belief that human beings are free to create (or will) their own order.
    • Grant was born in Toronto on 13 November 1918, the son of Maude Erskine (née Parkin) and William Lawson Grant. He came from a distinguished Canadian family of scholars and educators. His father was the principal of Upper Canada College, and his paternal grandfather George Monro Grant was the dynamic principal of Queen’s University. His maternal grandfather was Sir George Robert Parkin, also a principal at Upper Canada College, whose daughter Alice married Vincent Massey, the Canadian diplomat and first Canadian-born Governor General of Canada. Both of his grandfathers were strong proponents of the bonds between Canada and the British Empire, and this greatly influenced their grandson. His nephew Michael Ignatieff is a public intellectual and former Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons. His niece Caroline Andrew was a political scientist. On 1 July 1947 he married Sheila Allen whom he had met at Oxford.
  • Fifth Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=2887
  • Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/203707487/george-parkin-grant