Pete Wolfendale

Dr
Name: Pete Wolfendale
Location: B Ring 709 Auckland Park Kingsway Campus
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Contact Details:
Tel: +27 (0) 11 559 2334

Email: Pete.Wolfendale@gmail.com

About Pete Wolfendale

Pete Wolfendale is working within the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic/mathematics, philosophy of mind/AI. He received his PhD from the University of Warwick, UK, and joined UJ under the supervision of Prof. Rafael Winkler in 2016.

His thesis, titled ‘The Question of Being: Heidegger and Beyond’, was an attempt to reformulate the question of the meaning of Being after Heidegger, using some decidedly non-Heideggerian tools, in order to provide a methodological framework for doing post-Heideggerian metaphysics. Overall, his work aims to develop the consequences of philosophical rationalism for the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and metaphysics. His current project pursues the possibility of Computational Kantianism, interpreting Kant’s transcendental psychology through developments in artificial intelligence research and understanding the program of artificial general intelligence in terms of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. He is the author of ‘Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes’ (Urbanomic 2014).

Pete has a broad range of philosophical influences, including but not limited to: Socrates, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Foucault, Brandom, and Deleuze, and his thematic interests range over the whole of the philosophical field, including special interests in: metaphysics (history, methodology, process metaphysics, structuralism), philosophy of language (inferentialist semantics and normative pragmatics), philosophy of logic/mathematics (categorical logic, substructural logics, logical expressivism, constructivism), philosophy of mind/artificial intelligence (functionalism, AGI, computational Kantianism), philosophy of science (conceptual change, mathematical modelling), philosophy of action/value (the relations between Goodness, Beauty and Truth), philosophy of politics (resurrecting a Platonic/Kantian/Hegelian theory of Justice), ethics (deontological expressivism, technologies of selfhood), along with philosophy of art and aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger, Deleuze, the aesthetics of games, the concept of Beauty).

Pete blogs at deontologistics (deontologistics.wordpress.com), and other writing can be found on his academia.edu page (https://johannesburg.academia.edu/PeterWolfendale).

​Publications

Sole Authored Books

● (2014) Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes. Urbanomic Press.

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

● (2016) ‘Castalian Games’ in Glass Bead, Site 0: Castalia, the Game of Ends and Means, http://www.glass-bead.org/journal/site-0-castalia-the-game-of-ends-and-means/

● (2016) ‘Is there a TV in my head?: Content, Functional Mapping, and the Myth of the Given’ in TAULA. Quaderns di Filosofia: Special Issue on the Philosophy of W. Sellars.

● (2013) ‘The Ends of Beauty: Sinnead Murphy’s The Art Kettle’ in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Volume 24.

● (2012) ‘The Noumenon’s New Clothes: On Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy (Part 1)’, in Speculations Volume III. Punctum Press.

Articles and Chapters in Refereed Books

● (forthcoming 2016) ‘Rationalist Inhumanism’ in the Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury Academic.

● (forthcoming 2016) ‘Object-Oriented Ontology’ in the Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury Academic.

● (forthcoming 2016) ‘The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens’ in The Inhuman. MERVE Verlag.

● (2014) ‘The Necessity of Contingency’ in The Meillassoux Dictionary Edinburgh University Press.

● (2014) ‘Ray Brassier’ in The Meillassoux Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press.

● (2012) ‘Why Dungeons and Dragons is Art’, co-authored with Timothy Franklin, in Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy, ed. Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox. Open Court Press