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

[7] 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.

"Our vision of ourselves as freedom in an indifferent world could only have arisen in so far as we had analyzed to disintegration those systems of meaning, given in myth, philosophy and revelation, which had held sway over our progenitors.

"[11] Grant vigorously opposed euthanasia, which he defined as "deliberately causing the death of someone who is not already dying," and abortion, except where the mother's life is in danger, or in psychologically traumatizing instances of rape, especially of young girls.

He warned that legal access to euthanasia (or assisted suicide) and abortion on demand could result in the killing of people considered less human or less valuable such as the aged, handicapped or the infirm.

[12] Although he is considered the main theoretician of red Toryism, he expressed dislike of the term when applied to his deeper philosophical interests, which he saw as his primary work as a thinker.

[22] He attended Balliol College at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, a trust his grandfather, George Parkin, had headed at one time.

[23] Upon winning the Rhodes Scholarship, he enrolled towards a degree in law at Oxford,[24] but after the Second World War ended, and Grant had experienced a deeper personal engagement with Christianity, he decided to change studies.

Grant's definition is telling, in that it marks his take on philosophy's human perspective, which did not necessarily include assumptions regarding the objectivity of science, or the acceptance of the Enlightenment's fact–value distinction.

Grant strongly critiqued what he believed were the worst facets of modernity, namely unbridled technological advancement and a loss of moral foundations to guide humanity.

It began as a series of CBC lectures, and in it he posed the question of how human beings can reconcile moral freedom with acceptance of the view that an order exists in the universe beyond space and time.

The idea of progress had lost its connection to our moral development and had been co-opted into a utilitarian mastery of nature to satisfy human appetites.

His three-decades-long meditation on French philosopher Simone Weil's works led to the conclusion that there were fundamental moral and spiritual flaws in Western civilization, consigning it to a fate of inevitable collapse.