Anthony Quinton

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

Quinton and his mother were passengers aboard the British ocean liner SS City of Benares. The ship was carrying 100 children (including Quinton himself) when it was torpedoed by a Nazi submarine, U-48, while mid-Atlantic. 258 people out of 406 on board (including 81 children) died.

He was educated at Stowe School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took first-class honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. A fellow of All Souls from 1948, 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] An admirer of Margaret Thatcher, he sat in the Lords as a Conservative.

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

In September, 1940, Anthony Quinton and his mother, Letitia, booked a passage on the British passenger liner to trade war-torn England for Canada, were Mrs. Quinton's mother lived. The ship set sail on September 13, 1940, with 406 people on board, including the Quintons. At 10:03 PM September 17, 1940, the ship was torpedoed by U-48 and began to rapidly sink. Fifteen-year-old Quinton had been in the ship's lounge reading a Novel about Napoleon. When the torpedo struck the Lounge swayed and a cloud of dust lifted off the carpet. The alarm bells rang, and Mrs. Quinton, a logical woman, rushed out of the Lounge with her son. The two went down to their cabin and put on their life-jackets. Letitia Quinton stuffed their papers and anything valuable into her large hand-bag, then they went back up to the Lounge, as it was their muster station. While waiting for further orders, a man, British parliamentarian Colonel James Baldwin-Webb, decided the wait had been long enough and took them to the lifeboats. Quinton and his mother scrambled into Lifeboat 6, which was heavily overpacked, full with roughly 65 people. As the lifeboat went down, the falls and cables on one end of the boat snapped, sending the boat lurching forward, and tossing the majority of the passengers into the sea. Anthony Quinton was trapped by a heavy set woman, this happened to be Mrs. Anne Fleetwood-Hesketh, the mother of Rodger Fleetwood-Hesketh. Quinton clung to her hoping, her weight would keep them both from falling, but the two tumbled into the sea. Quinton resurfaced and his mother pulled him back into the lifeboat, still holding her hand-bag in one hand. The lifeboat now contained only 23 people, two of which had been rescued from another lifeboat, therefore, only 21 people out of the estimated sixty-five people in the lifeboat survived.[9]

Through the night many more people in the lifeboat died, including four children. By morning, only eight people, two women (including Mrs. Quinton), five men, and one child (Quinton himself) remained alive from this lifeboat. Other lifeboats on board had suffered just as much, some had capsized, and one didn't have any living people in it. HMS Hurricane, rescued 105 survivors from the water, including Quinton and his mother.[9] One lifeboat was left adrift at sea for eight days before being rescued by another ship, which brought the survivor toll up to 148. Quinton was one of only nineteen children who survived. Of the 406 people on board, 258 died (including 81 children). The disaster would impact Quinton for the rest of his life.

In the debate about philosophical universals, Quinton defended a variety of nominalism that identifies properties with a set of "natural" classes.[10] 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.[11][12]

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.[10]

• 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