Have a Good NEWS

Oxford philosopher, Tory thinker and regular on popular Radio 4 panel shows

Anthony Quinton, who has died aged 85, was the funniest philosopher since Hume. A political philosopher and metaphysician, as well as a writer about ethics, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas, he taught at New College, Oxford, for 23 years. He went on to be president of Trinity College from 1978 to 1987, and chairman of the board of the British Library from 1985 to 1990.

A member of a thinktank that advised Margaret Thatcher's government, he displayed a brilliance as a theoretician that tremendously impressed the prime minister herself, and was created a life peer in 1982. But he was never swayed by what was fashionable, either in philosophy or politics. He was more of an old-style patrician Tory than a new-style libertarian, although liberal in his views on homosexuality and florid in life-style. "A man with his own voice," the biographer Richard Ellmann called him.

Quinton is best known in academic circles for his book on metaphysics, The Nature of Things (1973), and also for his more popular The Politics of Imperfection (1978), about the history of conservatism. Utilitarian Ethics (1973) was a brilliant exposition of utilitarianism â€" the notion, which he himself espoused, that morality consists in promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He was firmly in the Anglo-American analytic school, and of a robust empiricist persuasion, holding that only what can ultimately be traced back to sensory experience should count as knowledge â€" he excoriated the "rhapsodic style" and "Bacchanalian revels of unreason" of much continental philosophy.

Yet, his no-nonsense Dr Johnson tendency, coupled with the Humean sensibility of an 18th-century man of letters, gave him a conception of philosophy that was more wide-ranging and pluralistic than that of his socialite, socialist friend and fellow empiricist, AJ (Freddie) Ayer. Regarding philosophy as "the criticism of assumptions", one of the dogmas he criticised was Ayer's verification principle. Anglo-Saxon philosophy had a "strangely attenuated way" of dealing with humans, treating them as merely rational thinking beings. Cooking and laughing, he said, were also defining human characteristics.

A penetrating but unmalicious wit, and a marvellous raconteur, Quinton could make a well-aimed, funny, affectionate speech for any occasion at the drop of a hat, and often featured on Radio 4 series that combined humour and scholarship, such as Round Britain Quiz, which he chaired, and Quote Unquote. "When he started to talk," said a fellow academic, "men, women, children, animals, all downed tools to listen."

Tremendously erudite, he seemed to have total recall. He could lucidly distil the essence of the Chinese novel, Portuguese architecture, the most abstruse philosopher, or a television soap, when asked, and was frequently consulted by colleagues for the source of quotations or references, which he would supply on the back of a racy postcard. During tutorials at New College, he would sit on the sofa like Humpty Dumpty, delivering an amusing lecturette on the students' topic, occasionally interrupting it to answer the phone and provide a recipe for pheasant sauce before turning back unruffled to resume his discourse.

Quinton was educated at the liberal public school, Stowe, in Buckinghamshire. His father was a surgeon captain in the Royal Navy. At the beginning of the second world war, Anthony and his mother were sent to Canada on the SS City of Benares. It was torpedoed, and they were among 50 people who were lowered to the sea in a lifeboat. Twenty-seven of these fell overboard when the boat's prow dropped, and, after 20 hours drifting in the ocean, only eight were actually rescued. Quinton was proud of his mother for behaving with "old-fashioned grit", managing to hold on to her handbag throughout the ordeal.

It was by no means the worst experience of his life, he would later say, but some of his friends wondered if it accounted for his being "quite good at eating". In middle age, when, after a walk in the Berkshire Downs, he and some friends spotted a village shop selling pies, cakes and fizzy drinks under the sign Quality Our Motto, Quinton said, "Oh dear, 'Quantity' mine."

In January 1943, Quinton went to Christ Church, Oxford, on a scholarship, but that August, aged 18, he joined the RAF as a flying officer and navigator, returning to finish his degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1946, and graduating with a first two years later. All Souls College made him a prize fellow in 1949, along with Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, but turned down Ayer. In 1955, Quinton began to teach philosophy at New College, and was soon part of Ayer's seminal discussion group, which also included Peter Strawson, Michael Dummett and David Pears, and later Paul Grice and Philippa Foot.

Despite his brilliance, he was never very prolific, yet his slim output was incisive and influential. In the much-cited article Spaces and Times (1962), he mooted that it was possible in principle for someone to inhabit two spatially unrelated worlds, one of which is his waking reality, the other the reality of continuous and coherent dreams.

In 1967, he both cut through and clarified logical tangles in his paper on the a priori and the analytic in Strawson's Philosphical Logic, and edited the collection Political Philosophy. His magnum opus, The Nature of Things (1973), presented a materialist metaphysics, taking as its central theme the much-disputed concept of substance, originated by Aristotle. Quinton argued that there are four distinct, if connected, problems of substance, and that many of the muddles in philosophy have been brought about by failure to recognise this distinctness. Thoughts and Thinkers (1982) and From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein (1998) were collections of his eclectic and witty articles and papers.

Quinton had a long association with New College, starting in 1955, and was made emeritus fellow in 1980 and honorary fellow in 1997. Consulted in 1969 about concerns that male undergraduates were cohabiting with women in the college, Quinton (himself pretty portly at this time) declared, "That is most unlikely, considering the size of the rooms," and the matter was laid to rest. The following year, a proposal that undergraduates should be allowed to sleep with women undisturbed at weekends was met with the objection that this was "the thin end of the wedge". "Better than the other," said Quinton. He failed to be elected warden of New College, but did become head of Trinity.

Unusually wealthy for an academic, Quinton owned a London flat in St James's Square (later one in Albany, Piccadilly), a cottage in the country, and in New York â€" the home city of his wife, Marcelle Wegier, whom he married in 1952 â€" an apartment on 5th Avenue and a house on Long Island. Maybe wealth sapped his ambition. Under "recreations" in his section in Who's Who, is the terse entry: "Sedentary pursuits".

He was never, as the philosopher Ronald Dworkin said, celebrated enough by Oxford. Widely perceived as out of tune with the times â€" conservative, unsympathetic to student revolt, snobbish even â€" he was, in fact, with his huge capacity for enjoyment, easy wit, unpretentiousness, very much a creature of his hedonistic era. He enjoyed opulence but also the studenty hobby of "totting": ferreting around in dustbins for useful items.

And why should angst have metaphysical priority over the mystic's sense of unity with the universe, or over "the practical man's conviction that the world is his oyster"? For him, philosophy was "an essentially social undertaking", and dialogue "its bloodstream". Yet despite his bonhomie and clubbability, he himself was hard to pin down. "A monster of urbanity," a friend called him, but added that ultimately he was unknowable, with "much more to him than his chromium-plated exterior would suggest".

He is survived by Marcelle, a daughter and a son.

• Anthony Meredith Quinton, Baron Quinton, philosopher, born 25 March 1925; died 19 June 2010