Anthony Meredith Quinton and Herber Paul Grice

Quinton, born Kent, 1925 -- Grice's junior by 12 years. (Grice born Staffordshire, 1913).

From the Daily Telegraph obituary of Lord Quinton:

"Quinton went up as a scholar to Christ Church, Oxford,
graduating with a brilliant First in Philosophy, Politics
and Economy, after which he became a Fellow of All Souls. In
1955 he was appointed fellow and tutor of New College."

"It was an exciting time in philosophy, as Quinton later
recalled in a review of Tom Stoppard's philosophical play
Jumpers"

Quinton said,

""Philosophy was much more in the public eye then
than it is today."

--- the public eyes, as I prefer. I cannot see how the public can have stereoscopic vision with only one eye. I mean, if we are going to mix a metaphor (Just teasing).

""The austerities and consequent boredom of the war
and the years that directly followed it awoke an
appetite for intellectual self-improvement from
which philosophy, along with a lot of other things, benefited. There
were philosophers about able and willing to catch the
attention of a large public audience: Bertrand Russell and AJ Ayer and poor old 'Professor' Joad, who never reached that rank, but was at least lively and colourful."

---- I suppose the most 'popular' Grice got was
had his "Metaphysics" lecture read for the Third
Programme of the BBC, later edited by D. F. Pears,
The nature of metaphysics.

"That has all rather petered out."

----- Hyperbole! There'll always be the dreaming spires!

"Quinton's impatience with solemnity, his delight in puncturing intellectual pomposity, and his sense that there is no intellectual problem so serious or terrible that it cannot be made the subject of a witty after-dinner speech (he was proud of the fact that his first book, The Nature of Things, contained no footnotes) made him much sought-after as a tutor."

--- Somone should footnote that, sooner or later.

Recalling tutorials with T. Lawson: "Instead of the usual business of submitting the pupil to Socratic questioning, it was the other way round. He put me on the spot and I don't mind admitting it."

As a member of the board of the British Library, he was responsible for the new building.

"When the Prince of Wales observed that the new building looked

"nothing like a library",

Quinton dismissed his remarks as "unreflective", pointing out
that no building looks like a library from the outside."

---- which IS true. Perhaps the Swimming-Pool Library does, but then it's ALL outside. I must say that the Boedlian looks more like a ... Boedlian.

---

We should be able to discuss some of his views at the Grice Club. I think there are two main areas of concern:

1. Quinton's work on the apriori. I used to like to say that if the Americans had QUINE refuting the dogma, the Oxonians had QUIN-ton restituting it. His "A priori" was nicely reprinted from the pages of the Aristotelian Society by Sir Peter Strawson in his "Philosophical Logic" (Oxford readings in Philosophy).

2. "Causal Theory of Perception" -- Hamsphire and Quinton would attend Grice's seminars in the philosophy of perception, so one would need to doublecheck this.

3. I was recently reading, to provide commentary in another forum, CHORA, some fragments of an essay by Quinton on "Madness" for the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He makes the extraordinarily good point that the PHILOSOPHICAL point about madness has to do with Kant and Descartes -- in something like the lack of the apperception of the cogito. I may retrieve the fragments.

I expect he wrote tons of things. The Daily Telegraph focuses on the book form things:

"Quinton's notably lucid books on philosophy and the history of philosophy include

The Nature of Things (1973);

The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (1978);

Thoughts and Thinkers (1982); and

Utilitarian Ethics (1973), a classic study acknowledged to be the most reliable introduction to its subject."

"He also wrote acclaimed studies of thinkers such as Francis Bacon and David Hume, edited the anthology

Political Philosophy (1967)

[Bayne's favourite]

and wrote

From Wodehouse To Wittgenstein (1998), a collection of essays applying philosophy to political and social questions."