Georgie Newson - Artificial reason
Review of Peter Wolfendale, The Revenge of Reason (2025)
In The Revenge of Reason, a multi-faceted defence of left-accelerationist ‘Prometheanism’, Peter Wolfendale bemoans the ‘persistent misunderstanding’ that ‘the purpose of acceleration is to deepen immiseration in order to hasten revolution.’ He proposes that accelerationism be defined as the ‘insistence that the transition between capitalism and post-capitalism’ mirror ‘the transition between feudalism and capitalism’: ‘a complex process that can and should be accelerated rather than a radical break in the horizon of thought and action.’ Wolfendale describes himself as a ‘systematic philosopher’, and The Revenge of Reason, a collection of his essays written between 2010 and 2025, is astonishingly wide-ranging. But there is a clear thread running through its forays into aesthetic theory, ‘transcendental logic’, Deleuzian metaphysics and cognitive functionalism: a metaphysical-political theory of the radical freedom of rational beings.
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/rp220_newson_wolfendale.pdf