He was the only son of Surgeon Captain Richard Frith Quinton, Royal Navy (1889–1935) and his wife (Gwenllyan) Letitia (née Jones).

[7] On 7 February 1983,[8] he was created a life peer as Baron Quinton, of Holywell in the City of Oxford and County of Oxfordshire.

[3] Thus, in September 1940, Letitia Quinton booked passage for them both aboard the City of Benares due shortly to sail from Liverpool to Montreal.

As it was lowered, the falls and cables on one end snapped, sending the boat lurching forward, and tossing the majority of the passengers into the sea.

Quinton was trapped by a heavy set woman, Mrs Anne Fleetwood-Hesketh: he clung to her, hoping her weight would keep them both from falling, but both fell into the sea.

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

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.

That brings out the generally second-order character of the subject, as reflective thought about particular kinds of thinking – formation of beliefs, claims to knowledge – about the world or large parts of it.

Each of the three elements in this list has a non-philosophical counterpart, from which it is distinguished by its explicitly rational and critical way of proceeding and by its systematic nature.

Metaphysics replaces the unargued assumptions embodied in such a conception with a rational and organised body of beliefs about the world as a whole.

Ethics, or moral philosophy, in its most inclusive sense, seeks to articulate, in rationally systematic form, the rules or principles involved.