Anthony Quinton, Baron Quinton

Anthony Meredith Quinton, Baron Quinton (25 March 192519 June 2010) was an English political and moral philosopher, metaphysician, and materialist philosopher of mind. He served as President of Trinity College, Oxford from 1978 to 1987; and as chairman of the board of the British Library from 1985 to 1990. He is also remembered as a presenter of the BBC Radio programme Round Britain Quiz.

Life 'Tony' Quinton (as he was called by all who knew him)

He was educated at Stowe School then went on a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford in 1943. He read modern history for two terms before joining the RAF as a flying officer and navigator. He returned in 1946, obtaining a first-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1949. he became a Fellow and tutor of New College, Oxford, in 1955. He was President of Trinity College, Oxford, from 1978 to 1987. He was chairman of the board of the British Library from 1985 to 1990.

On 7 February 1983, he was created a life peer as Baron Quinton, of Holywell in the City of Oxford and County of Oxfordshire. An admirer of Margaret Thatcher, he sat in the Lords as a Conservative. he went on to participate in Magee's BBC Television series Men of Ideas (1978), in an episode dedicated to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and The Great Philosophers (1987) and their companion books.

He died on 19 June 2010.

Through the night more passengers, including four children, died. By morning, only eight people, comprising five men, two women (including Mrs Quinton), and one child (Quinton himself) remained alive. Other lifeboats had suffered equally. HMS Hurricane rescued 105 survivors from the water, including Quinton and his mother. 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.

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. with Marcelle Quinton, Before We Met (2008) Of Men and Manners: Essays Historical and Philosophical (2011), Kenny, Anthony (ed.)

Books edited

Select papers/book chapters "Spaces and Times" (1962) Philosophy. 37 (140): 130–147, reprinted in: (eds.) Le Poidevin, R., & MacBeath, M. The Philosophy of Time (1993) '“The ‘A Priori’ and the Analytic.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 64, 1963, pp. 31–54, reprinted in: (ed.) Strawson, P. F., Philosophical logic. (1967) "Absolute Idealism" Proceedings of the British Academy 57, 1971 (1973) "Persistence of intellectual nationalism," in: Perspectives on culture and society, vol. 1 (1988), 1–22 "Ayer's place in the history of philosophy" in: Griffiths, A. Phillips. (ed.) A.J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (1992) "Morals and politics" (1993) In: (ed) Griffiths, A. Phillips. .Ethics. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 35, "Political Philosophy" (1994) in: Kenny, Anthony (ed.) The Oxford history of Western philosophy,

Popular writings New York Review, 21 June 2001, review of Hegel: A Biography by Terry Pinkard