Review of William Pinar, Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant's Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology presents a much-needed and welcome addition to scholarship on one of Canada's most significant philosophers.Widely recognized as a major conservative thinker and public intellectual, George Grant (1918-1988) came to national prominence in Canada with the 1965 publication of Lament for a Nation, which argued that due to the twin effects of liberalism and technological dynamism, it was no longer possible for Canada to exist independent of the expanding American empire.This book and his other public 1 engagement were so broadly received that he became a household name and the paradigm for a distinctly Canadian political term ("red tory").Despite this, only 2 a handful of monographs have been published on Grant, and Pinar's book is the first published after the completion of the Collected Works of George Grant in 2009.As a result, Moving Images of Eternity represents the first effort to make full use of the resources available in the Collected Works and to expand on them with the help of a modest body of secondary literature.Whereas previous scholarship depended on work available only at the National Archives or to intimates of Grant and his family, Moving Images takes a significant first step in public discussion of Grant using publicly available materials.Moving Images seeks to provide an account of Grant's understanding of education, teaching, and the curriculum, and to place that account in conversation with both secondary literature on Grant and a host of other scholars and thinkers working on the same or related issues.At 459 pages, Moving Images is a success in this regard, though it invites and requires further work, both elaborations of certain themes and rebuttals to some of Pinar's bolder claims.Moving Images proves an engaging read for those already quite familiar with Grant as it takes a new approach to his corpus and makes a few bold, if contestable, claims along the way.Above all else, the broad project of Moving Images is indeed a new approach for a monograph-length study of Grant.Despite Grant's enduring
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".