Peter Dickens has a near-unique ability to take up and see what is valuable in each new intellectual fashion, while never being carried away as a "dedicated follower". While some of us might deride the latest continental import as old wine in new bottles, or as mere rhetoric dressed up as knowledge, Dickens patiently shows how something can be drawn from it without sacrificing what is also worth retaining in older traditions of thought. His ability to do this has, I think two sources. One is his deep and life-long commitment to humanitarian moral values, and his closely associated intellectual coherence. The other is his insistence on grounding his thinking in empirical work.