From an OBITUARY in The Daily Telegram – Quinton went up as a scholar to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with a brilliant First in PPE, 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: “Philosophy was much more in the public eye then than it is today,” he wrote. “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. That has all rather petered out. The brightest young philosophers nowadays emigrate to the United States.”
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.
Continued at The Daily Telegraph | More Chronicle & Notices.
