George Grant

Grant, George Parkin

George Parkin Grant, political and religious philosopher (b at Toronto 13 Nov 1918; d at Halifax 27 Sept 1988), son of William Lawson Grant, principal of Upper Canada College and grandson of George Monro GRANT, principal of Queen's University and Sir George PARKIN, founding secretary of the Rhodes scholarships. A public intellectual and one of the most influential Canadian thinkers of his age, Grant was a Christian and a Platonist who always thought of philosophy in terms of its Greek root words that mean "love of wisdom."



In the 1970s Grant's writings began to change. Previously he had been concerned with how to communicate his thought to a wide audience, as his radio broadcasts indicate. Now, although he never wrote in jargon or for a professional audience, his writings became more complex and placed greater demands upon the reader. English-Speaking Justice (1974) asked the Platonic question of how we could know that we had a duty to treat other human beings justly, especially after the American Supreme Court had declared that a fetus was not a person. Grant was beginning to come to the conclusion that the science of human and non-human nature, which had begun 400 years earlier with Francis Bacon, had led to a society in which human beings were not fitted to live.



Further Reading

  • Charles Taylor, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada (1982); William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (1993); William Christian and Sheila Grant, The George Grant Reader (1997).