Anthony Quinton

Quinton was born at 5, Seaton Road, Gillingham, Kent, the only son of Royal Navy surgeon captain Richard Frith Quinton (1889–1935) and his wife (Gwenllyan) Letitia (née Jones).[2]

A fellow of All Souls, he became a Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1955.[3] He was President of Trinity College, Oxford, from 1978 to 1987.[1]

Quinton was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1975 to 1976.[4] He was chairman of the board of the British Library from 1985 to 1990.[1]

On 7 February 1983,[5] he was created a life peer as Baron Quinton, of Holywell in the City of Oxford and County of Oxfordshire.[6][7][8]

To BBC Radio audiences, Quinton became well known as a presenter of the long-running Round Britain Quiz.[1][3]

In the debate about philosophical universals, Quinton defended a variety of nominalism that identifies properties with a set of "natural" classes.[9] David Malet Armstrong has been strongly critical of natural class nominalism: Armstrong believes that Quinton's 'natural' classes avoid a fairly fundamental flaw with more primitive class nominalisms, namely that it has to assume that for every class you can construct, it must then have an associated property. The problem for the class nominalist according to Armstrong is that one must come up with some criteria to determine classes that back properties and those which just contain a collection of heterogeneous objects.[10][11]

Quinton's version of class nominalism asserts that determining which are the natural property classes is simply a basic fact that is not open to any further philosophical scrutiny. Armstrong argues that whatever it is which picks out the natural classes is not derived from the membership of that class, but from some fact about the particular itself.

While Quinton's theory states that no further analysis of the classes is possible, he also says that some classes may be more or less natural—that is, more or less unified than another class. Armstrong illustrates this intuitive difference Quinton is appealing to by pointing to the difference between the class of coloured objects and the class of crimson objects: the crimson object class is more unified in some intuitive sense (how is not specified) than the class of coloured objects.

In Quinton's 1957 paper, he sees his theory as a less extreme version of nominalism than that of Willard van Orman Quine, Nelson Goodman and Stuart Hampshire.[9]

• Spaces and Times (1962)
• Political Philosophy (editor) (1967)
• The Nature of Things (London, 1973)
• The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (1978)
• Utilitarian Ethics (1973)
• Francis Bacon (Oxford, 1980)
• Thoughts and Thinkers (1982)
• "Persistence of intellectual nationalism," Perspectives on culture and society, vol. 1 (1988), 1–22
• From Wodehouse To Wittgenstein (1998)

• Obituary in The Times
• Obituary in The Guardian
• Obituary in The Daily Telegraph