Anthony Quinton

Anthony Meredith Quinton, Baron Quinton (25 March 1925 – 19 June 2010) was a British political and moral philosopher, metaphysician, and materialist philosopher of mind.

A fellow of All Souls, he became a Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1955, and was President of Trinity College, Oxford, from 1978 to 1987.

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1975 to 1976. He was Chairman of the Board of the British Library from 1985 to 1990.

In 1983, he was made a life peer as Baron Quinton, of Holywell in the City of Oxford and County of Oxfordshire.

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

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

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