Penny McCarthy

Richard Rorty’s review of Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity (LRB, 8 April) is a heartening example of the virtues of his own ethic – of dialogue, of being open to persuasion by the argumentation of others with whom one only partially agrees. But it still leaves some anomalies in the ‘anti-metaphysical’ position which should worry those who have no wish to rejoin the metaphysicians....

Having spent a little time in Sinfield’s ‘knowing study at Sussex’ this year while on an MA course in Renaissance literature, I must take issue with some of your Bardbiz correspondents – James Wood (Letters, 25 April) is one – who impute joylessness and arrogance to cultural materialists. I am a woolly liberal and a poet, and cannot always agree with my tutors on writing, cultural production,...