What's happening?

It is a bit rich of Richard Rorty, of all people, to complain that students these days have little sense of what's happening in the world ("Engage with the world", THES, October 16).

Can this be the same Richard Rorty who is a leading advocate of the postmodern view "wherein philosophy abandons its quest for objective or ultimate truth"? In which case, there can be no such thing as "what's happening in the world", objectively - only stories some people choose to tell, and others choose to be bored with.

The good professor's philosophy and his politics would thus seem to be in contradiction. Or has Rorty broken so entirely with his discipline's traditions as to reject even that fundamental concept?

As it happens, I am much in sympathy with Rorty's views. His diagnosis of what is wrong with American universities is spot on. Yet, to mix Robert Merton and Louis Althusser, he should be more sensitive to the latent functions of his own theoretical interventions.

Relativism is fine and dandy when confined to a few cognoscenti. But now half-baked notions of post-modernism have escaped to infect our wider culture, adding one more enervating strand to its narcissism and nihilism. No surprise, then, if the young adopt the stance put pithily by an earlier sage 30 years ago: "Nothing is real. And nothing to get hung about."

Aidan Foster-Carter Honorary senior research fellowLeeds University