George Grant (philosopher)

George Parkin Grant, OC, FRSC (November 13, 1918 – September 27, 1988) was a Canadian philosopher, professor, and political commentator.

Toronto: House of Anansi

• Modern technology is not simply an extension of human making through the power of a perfected science, but is a new account of what it is to know and to make in which both activities are changed by their co-penetration.
  • p. 13

• Modern human beings since their beginnings have been moved by the faith that the mastery of nature would lead to the overcoming of hunger and labour, disease and war on so widespread a scale that at last we could build the world-wide society of free and equal people. One must never think about technological destiny without looking squarely at the justice in those hopes. Let none of us who live in the well-cushioned west speak with an aesthetic tiredness about our 'worldliness'.
  • p. 15

• When we represent technology to ourselves through its own common sense we think of ourselves as picking and choosing in a supermarket, rather than within the analogy of the package deal. We have bought a package deal of far more fundamental novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control. It is a destiny which enfolds us in its own conceptions of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness.
  • p. 32

• There is a pressing need to understand our technological destiny from principles more comprehensive than its own. This need lifts us up to ask about the great western experiment in a more than piecemeal way. It pushes us to try to understand its meaning in terms of some openness to the whole which is not simply sustenance for the further realisation of that experiment. But the exigency of our need for understanding must not blind us to the tightening circle in which we find ourselves. We are called to understand technological civilisation just when its very realisation has radically put in question the possibility that there could be any such understanding.
  • p. 34

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George Grant (philosopher)

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