Acid Horizon The Revenge of Reason: Hegel, Kant, and Neo-Rationalism with Pete Wolfendale
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Mar 16, 2026 
Pete Wolfendale, philosopher and author of The Revenge of Reason, outlines neo-rationalism and its stakes. He contrasts classical rationalism with online rationalist culture. He connects Kant and Hegel to computation, mutual recognition, and institutional thought. He explores Prometheanism, general intelligence, autonomy, and how critique ought to reshape social institutions.
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Reason Realized Through Implementation
- Neo-rationalism grounds reason in real-world processes rather than treating rational intuition as sui generis.
- Pete Wolfendale ties rationality to empirical realization via neuroscience, computer science, and implementation hierarchies like algorithms, interpreters, and hardware.
Abstraction As Functional Hierarchy
- Abstraction in computing is a hierarchy from problem, algorithm, language, interpreter to hardware, allowing movement between levels without losing implementation reality.
- Wolfendale uses Smale's sphere eversion and shared mathematical language to show diverse intuitions can coordinate via abstraction.
Kant As Proto AI Theorist
- Kant's Copernican turn reframes perception as actively individuating objects from unstructured data, akin to problems in machine vision.
- Wolfendale maps Kant's pure/empirical schemata to computational schemas and interactive manipulation in imagination.
